Another Essay on Crushing
in which I share excerpts from my diary; in which I remind you that that crushing is liberatory and anti-capitalist
In “Crushed Out,” Anna Fitzpatrick describes a brief romance with a guy she calls Robert. She meets him at a house party, sinks into the psychological depths of “the Crushzone,” and is disappointed to find out that he’s boring when they actually go out. The essay is a cautionary tale, warning readers that “having a crush requires a certain self-awareness that the person you’re jonesing after isn’t necessarily real.”
For serial crushers, this knowledge is a point of departure. It’s not about the crush, but about the act of crushing. As Tiana Read writes in “Crushed”, it is “not the individual crush that provides the life-confirming force—it is the generality of crushing, its atmospheric quality, its circulation around many.” If you accept crushing as a mode of living, any given crush is irrelevant, and by very definition, transient. If you don’t want to, you don’t ever have to face the truth of their being. Selfishly, they can be more of a Crush Object than a Crush. Of course, your Crush Object has a vivid existence of their own, but in your mind, they can be whomever you want. And isn’t that better, at the end of the day, than trying to control a real person?
In one of my favorite essays, “On Summer Crushing,” Hanif Abdurraqib admits that he doesn’t need to know, or even want to know, whether someone returns a crush. Taking inspiration from the Whitney Houston song “How Will I Know,” he writes:
I can hold a crush longer than most of my friends can hold a grudge. I don’t really need or even want to know whether a person shares my affection. I’m content just letting the situation play itself out at its own pace. I get that for most people, this seems agonizing. But, for all of the agony, what you get in return is the imagined person and not the actual person.
When you engage in crushing, you “get” the imagined person, and the incredibly rich process of imagining.1 As Abdurraqib argues, you also get the full emotional experience that come with uncertainty. He admits that “sometimes, it isn’t even the person you’re falling in love with, just the uncertainty itself.” Knowing that a crush likes or doesn’t like you serves to “make the emotional journey more finite.” The possibilities and imagined outcomes are suddenly narrowed down, your Crush Object is not only a Crush but a person, and you can’t really claw your way back to the sweet realm of fantasy after that.
Abdurraqib closes out his essay with the following lines: “So few of my crushes speak back. I am cultivating my comfort with unanswered desires, and it is going well. I have room for so much more. I say a prayer. I fall in love.”
From my on-again off-again diary, and in no particular order, some notes on crushing:
I.
I’m no longer frustrated by understanding myself through crushes. Yes, there’s the literature on the subject that has emboldened me to think that my long series of crushes has been meaningful, and not just time waste--the fact that prolific writers like Hanif Abdurraqib have written on the subject has embolden me. But also, I’ve started adopting the admittedly conciliatory energy of May God Give Me The Strength To Accept What I Cannot change.
II.
… And I’m crushing on [CRUSH OBJECT], and crushing is such a wonderful state of being. In the words of that piece – I would like to live in a state of crushing? Something like that??
III.
[CRUSH OBECT] is cool, a blank slate, we’ve had no history, no arguments, no ill will. Just two amicable strangers going on dates.
IV.
I’ve been feeling very good lately, very happy, like the world is my oyster. Part of it is [CRUSH OBJECT] which I…kind of resent. Another is [CRUSH OBJECT], which I feel good about. Regardless of whether or not I act on it…the bubble of adoration that I feel about/around [CRUSH OBJECT]…
V.
[CRUSH OBJECT’s] hands have an interesting shape to them, hard to describe, like shells almost?
VI.
…And maybe that’s when love is over, when there is no longer than constant stream of conversation, that webby thought connection, when someone isn’t always gunning in your thoughts for preeminence, when unrelated things happen and you no longer, oddly enough, think immediately of what such and such a person would think. When it no longer feels appropriate to tell them about every mundane little thing, how you suspect you might not have nose hairs, for example, or how you just discovered that condensed milk will do just the trick in coffee if you’re in a bind…
I have always been, and will forever be, a crush girl. Ask any of my friends, ask any of my loves, ask anyone who I have maniacally pursued. I fall into the legion of girls that has been misogynistically dismissed as “boy crazy,” just because I think more expansively than most. Just because I harbor an escapism that borders on the concerning. Just because I want to pull the red lever every time. I fundamentally do not understand the anxiety about the chase. The chase is everything. I have been known to leave my number on Whole Foods receipts, to ask strangers out after asking them for the Wifi password, to go on a city-wide quest to find “Stephen from Vinnie’s Pizza.” I used to read every Craigslist missed connection for fun, drowning in the second-hand desire for the impossible-possible. Men have been mystified by how quickly I have dropped them after going on a single date. I still remember the expression that one of my Crush Object’s had in his eyes upon rejection: why did you ask me out in the first place?
Because I yearn for so much more.
The Crush Object has always fallen short, but the real thrill has always been internal, a romance between me and my own desires. A sort of reminder than I can dream, and play, and fantasize beyond confines. Of course, the consequence of following through on the chase—cutting the “uncertainty” short when the poor thing inevitably falls into my lap—means that I have to repeat the chase with relative frequency.
My obsessions have bled onto the page, as you can see from my diary, and from this very essay. Looking back on the diary excerpts, I am in awe by the range of crush objects I have written about. Often, like in IV, there were multiple crush objects I entertained at once. There is confusion in my entries about “friend crushes” and “crush-crushes” but I am no longer interested in the heterosexual exercise of cleaving the two. Sometimes, like in VI, I mistook the death of a crush for the death of “love,” which is really interesting.
Basically, I am Annie Ernaux minus the whiteness and the Frenchness and the institutional legitimacy. Also minus the several published novels. I am obsessed with crushes, and love, and analyzing both. As a Muslim woman, I have a necessarily complex relationship to desire. Perhaps my serial crushing stems from the desire to “have” without “sinning”; to experience all of the drama without any of the corporeal follow-through. Either way, I’m grateful for it.
Crushing is not necessarily revolutionary, but sometimes it’s the closest we can get. Crushing is anti-capitalist because it happens during the workday. It eats up chunks of your “weekly check-in” and has the capacity to detail a Zoom meeting entirely. It says fuck you to any attempts at a workday, to experiencing the world in pathetically timed intervals, and to the oppressive lie of “forever now.”
Crushing is queer because it is a reminder that you cannot own someone. It forces you to practice being okay with that, again and again and again. Abdurraqib articulates this resignation with particular grace in his essay. Crushing also necessarily expands your imaginary beyond an individual someone. Focusing on one crush with the overt desire to “attain” them can drive you crazy, but experiencing crushing as a process can be liberating. As Reid writes: “Having a crush, and not only a monogamous partner, means you can always have more affiliations.” In the same paragraph she writes: “To think of the crush—mini or huge, mutual or unrequited—as a general singularity is to admit that desire, however fleeting, can be attached to one person but is never only one person.”
Having a crush is an escape from being single, from being coupled, and from generally existing (i.e, being forced to operate within oppressive systems.) Crushing is whatever we thought Hollywood was when we were eight years old. Crushing is the perfect two-minute long Ariana Grande pop song. Crushing is Islamic because it is humble, defined by the pre-condition of surrender. It is the purest distillation of desire. It is the closest we can get to the love that is sold to us: untouchable and perfect. Uncritical of itself. It is a Sunday kind of love without the Sunday stack of dishes. Without the quabble over the sink. It is utopia, finally.
Within the reality of constant surveillance, it feels even more important to experience what Abdurraqib calls the “secret pleasures of a crush.” At a time when everything from our subway rides to our bodega purchases is tracked in order to be used against us later—jeopardizing, as Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, our once-sacred right to personal autonomy—it feels even more important to have a little crush.
I have a crush. I say a prayer. I leave a number, but this time, not my own. I yearn for so much more.
One Acknowledgement
This essay is dedicated to a Crush, who shared a love syllabus with me on Google Drive about a year ago. Many of the pieces I reference came straight from that resource, and this essay would have been impossible without it.
One Tip
Like my writing? Have a FAT crush on me? Want to support me as I apply for journalism fellowships? Feel free to tip me through my Ko-fi account.
What you don’t “get” is the crush—for the purposes of this essay, I’m eclipsing any possibilities/harbored desires to “get with” the crush (here the crush object) in real life.
I love what you’re positing here!!
“I harbor an escapism that borders on the concerning…” Reminds me of my latest reflections on how, growing up as a Muslim woman in my mom’s house, fantasizing about my crush was a form of escape (from my oppressively boring life at home with a curfew, surveillance, etc), and the way I would visualize better for my life—mainly because it was planted in my head that my husband will be the one to “let me” have an exciting life. Therefore it led to this “concerning” one-sided phenomenon that would develop toward Muslim guys who were even remotely prospects for marriage, which felt healthy because of “the desire to ‘have’ without ‘sinning’”. As I’m writing this I would be curious to hear about the experience of a crush from a man’s perspective. Gonna read Hanif’s piece!
Also crushing as anti capitalism is very relatable.
Thank you for this indulgent Sunday morning read!