There are many moments in a girl’s life when you look at someone and a horde of butterflies fills your stomach and makes your palms sweat uncontrollably. Yes, I am talking about having a crush on somone, which can be both a gift and a curse. However crushes just don’t appear out of nowhere (unless you believe in the whole “love at first sight” scenario), they are born in your mind and get stronger and stronger and almost become like a disease in your brain, that infects your emotions and thoughts and is a rentless string of doodling hearts in your notebook and staring off into space. Crushes slowely grow on you, and have a series of stages which I think are relevant in most crush cases. So to help explain the glorious, frustrating, rewarding and sometimese even disheartening feelings of having a crush, here are tthe five stages that most likely a lot of girls (and probalby guys too) go through.
Stage 1) Observation:
This is when the wave of emotions and insanity starts. You happent to notice a cute guy in your biology class and start assesing him. By the end of the class, you’ve come to the conclusion, “yeah he’s totally cute… perfect height, great smile, and brown eyes that are smoldeirng into my soul.”After this realization, you can’t keep your eyes off him, it’s like you have to observe every inch of his face so it will be forever etched into your memory, and you have to look causal while doing so, (“yeah I’m just staring at the clock above your head like nobody’s bussiness.”) By the time you’ve catalouged every great feature of him into your mind (even the little things like how he bites his lip while pondering a question) you’re pairing your name with his last name to make sure your first name would be a good match with his last name. You also start to observe all aspects of his personality; 30% great sense of humor, 20% extremely intellectual, 20% chivalrous, 20% family oriented, and 10% Harry Potter fan, and you are convinced that this person was made for you.
Stage 2) Denial:
Denial will tend to occur if you know he is already taken or if you believe that he doesn’t know you exist on planet Earth. You think to yourself, “Well what’s the point in liking him? It’ll merely be a waste of my time and emotions. Just because I keep planing out our hypothetical date doesn’t mean I like him. No, I’m not getting a crush, I’m not!”
You can tell this to yourself as many times as you want to, but this only makes matters worse. Sometimes you may even believe that it was just a coincidence that he’s starting to appear in your dreams, but why even bother denying it now? Soon you finally declare to yourself, “Yep, I really do like him.” Hence, this leads to stage number 3.
Stage 3) Acceptance/Obsession:
This is always a fun stage, because when you finally accept the fact that you like this person, your mood instantly shoots up and you feel like singing in a feild of butterflies with rainbows and happy sunshine gracing the sky. Everything is so much more amazing now that you like this person. Everything you do or see makes you think of him, even the most insignificant things like, “oh that person is getting a latte… John likes lattes too… hehe, maybe I should get one too!” This is also the period of complete and utter obsession, whenever you see him it’s like you’re seeing him for the first time and a choir of angels is singing behind you. You gaze and follow him around like a little puppy. You yearn to know everything about him, so you stalk him on all forms of social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, Google, ect. You want to find as many pictures of him as possible, and even go to the lengths of searching him on his old school’s website to find articles or more photos of him, you wonder slightly if you are crossing the creeper line when you friend him just to find his number and put it in your contacts with a bunch of heart emoijis next to it.
Whenever you see him in class, you always manage to snag the seat right next to him, and listen to every word he says as if he’s about to tell you the meaning of life. Obession, fixation, infatuation, worship and desire are only a few of the words that describe you in this state.
Stage 4) Announcement:
This is when you have to tell the whole world (except your crush in question) how great this person is. You tell your friends, family, roommates, starbucks baristas, and basically anyone who will listen to every little detail about your crush. Your crush is so amazingly perfect in your mind you just have to share his perfectness with anyone. Whenever you see your friends, they can’t get a word in edge wise because you immediately start telling them how he let you borrow his pencil, or how he gave you a ride to school, or even how he simply smiled at you in the hall. In general you feel so happy to have learned all these things about him, and if you even become friends with him it’s even better because then you can analyze and discuss all his actions and body language with your friends to try and decode whether he likes you or not. Basically, your bursting with so much happiness and love of this perosn that you simply have to blurt it all out to the next person who’s willing to listen (or pretending to listen is okay too)!
Stage 5) Requtied vs. Unrequited: The last stage of having a crush is either the happiest feeling in the world, or the most depressing and heart crushing and obliterating one. If you are lucky enough to have awkwardly charmed and flirted your way into his radar, and eventually pluck up the courage to causually, ‘beat around the bush’ ask him out then you can potentially score. If he happens to like you too, or asks you out then you come to the conclusion that dreams really do come true, and you have the feeling of jumping up and down and doing a victory dance, because in some crazy way you two ended up hanging out or grabbing a bite to eat. In my book, a simple recognition of your existence is a huge achievement.
However, there is the other side to the conclusion of a crush, one that I am very well versed in… unrequited love. Nothing is worse than the crappy discovery of him being taken or only liking you as a friend. Finding out he has a girlfriend or is otherwise uniterested is like having all your hopes and dreams shattered, then having the pieces put through a shredder. It makes you hurt in places that you didn’t know could hurt. Sometimes you wonder and are amazed at how painful heartbreak can be, when the only remedy is curling up in a ball of pathetic tears, eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, and washing it down with a bottle of wine, all the while having melancholy Adele and Sam Smith songs play on repeat.
Eventually, all these pent up feelings will fade though as you can still enjoy the comfort of friends, the medication of some good laughter, and confidence in yourself that you won’t be forever alone. Perhaps this person wasn’t right for you, and in the end maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. Mr. Right is out there somewhere, you just have to be able to be patient until you find him.