Unrequited (22 page)

Nikki spent a lot of time alone. She was forbidden to hang around outside or play with the other kids in the building. Her mother was worried about their older, tougher siblings. She didn’t want anything to “escalate,” she explained. When Nikki was in her teens, her mother warned her more specifically about men. Her mother’s own first love, the man she lost her virginity to, had betrayed her cruelly. After they’d had sex one afternoon, he let a friend into his apartment. He tried to hold Nikki’s mother down so
the friend could rape her. She escaped. The message to Nikki was always “be independent and don’t rely on anyone.”

Craig first caught Nikki’s attention in honors history class, during their junior year. Craig was debating with another girl about the Jim Jones massacre. The girl insisted that Jones killed all his followers. Craig parried back that plenty of the followers were responsible for their own deaths. “They
wanted
to drink the Kool-Aid,” he scoffed.

“Then I was like, ‘Oh my God, he is so hot,’” Nikki said in a whisper, as if, during our interview, Craig could somehow hear her. She was impressed with how smart he sounded. She was tall and lanky, qualities that made her feel awkward, and he was tall and lanky, too. “So he can relate,” she said.

She joined the senior trip committee so she would have an excuse to ask him where he thought the class should go, but she couldn’t manage much conversational momentum beyond that. She rarely spoke directly to him. Her crush was characterized by a slapstick goofiness. She’d impishly peer inside the room where he had a ninth-period class. If he turned to look at her, she’d bolt away, her backpack flapping against her back. She and her girlfriends prank-called Craig’s apartment, using *67 to shield her caller ID.

She created fake Myspace and Facebook accounts, using photos of girls she thought were attractive. She didn’t dare friend Craig, but she friended his brother Ky. Her IM chats with Ky turned into “heavy dirty talking,” with Nikki playing the role of the attractive temptress “Sarah,” who casually sneaked in the occasional query about Craig. She got up the nerve to ask Ky if Craig was interested in anyone. Ky told her he was—someone who was short. She thought, “What’s short?” “Some guys, if they’re tall, they think five foot nine is short,” she said. Then Ky said the girl his brother liked
had long hair. Then Nikki knew the girl Craig was interested in definitely wasn’t her.

She cried herself to sleep. She was getting nowhere. Her life seemed further and further away from the reality of her other classmates. One day a friend of hers made a joke about throwing a sex party. Nikki blurted out, “Girl, aren’t you a virgin?” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she realized that her friend probably wasn’t. By asking the question, she was exposing her naïveté—and her own embarrassing lack of experience.

The summer before Nikki left for college, she got her first cell phone. One of the first things she did with it was head to Craig’s apartment. She took along a male friend and sent him inside the building while she waited across the street. Her friend aimed the phone at the door of Craig’s unit, 2A, and filmed it for a few seconds. Nikki wanted the video of Craig’s door, which she’d never seen in person, “so I could feel like I was there, to have a memorabilia, a souvenir,” she told me.

What was behind that door? The private life of a boy she was obsessed with but barely knew. The prospect of a relationship and sex—which she both wanted and had been taught to view with great trepidation. Throughout the summer after her high school graduation, she peered at the door, pixilated and shaky on her tiny cell phone screen. Even after she left for college and stopped watching the file as often, she couldn’t bring herself to delete it. At the end of her freshman year, her phone broke. She couldn’t salvage anything on it.

There is much that
can
be salvaged from a crush. Nikki’s longing for Craig was her first experience of intense desire, with the considerable risks of consummation safely behind closed doors; there was no chance that loving Craig would interfere with her education and her future, the way boyfriends and sex did with so many
of her peers. Her crush, she told me, also led her to reckon with the impact of her father’s absence and her isolated upbringing. “My dad wasn’t like a dad growing up,” she told me. “It was just me and my mom. I was very lonely. I just wanted a friend I could talk to. I watched a lot of movies, and I think I’m influenced by a lot of love movies and love stories.” Another teen described her crushes as experiences that made her stronger by helping her see that she could get over disappointment. Rejection helped her develop her “logical side.” When a boy she had a crush on became interested in one of her friends, she forced herself to think through the situation. “There’s nothing I can do,” she told herself. “If they like each other and he is happier, why should I waste my time being sad about it? There’s a world of other males out there.”

Though plenty of teens nurture their crushes in secret, Weissbourd has observed that the obsessive nature of unrequited love can drive some young people to become quite voluble and expressive, even if they usually aren’t that open about their feelings. Parents should seize the opportunity to connect. “It’s really important just to listen to them, and think about what kind of meaning they are making from the crush, and reflect on it with them,” he said. “Then ask yourself: ‘How can I be a good parent for this experience?’”

Jennifer Powell-Lunder, a clinical psychologist who counsels adolescents in the New York City suburbs, said that part of good parenting means avoiding the tendency to overidentify with your daughter’s crush. A mother who assures her daughter, “I know what you’re going through,” threatens a teen’s sense of identity. “They believe no one has ever felt the way they do, because it’s so intense,” she said.

Carl Pickhardt, an Austin, Texas–based psychotherapist and author of several books on parenting adolescents, sees crushes as important “emotional risk taking.” Parents should help their kids
turn their attention away from whether the crush likes them back and toward themselves, particularly if the target of the crush is someone who isn’t likely to return their feelings. What does their crush tell them about what they value in a person? Are those values meaningful or superficial? What can teens learn about themselves that might help them in future relationships? “If you can get that data out of them, you can refer it back to them,” Pickhardt said. “These qualities describe the other person, but it also describes your child and what matters to her.” The crush, then, becomes a kind of attenuated dress rehearsal, a way to practice for the real thing in the relative safety of a girl’s own head.

DURING MARISSA’S SENIOR
year at an all-girls’ Catholic high school in suburban Buffalo, she fell hard for a physics teacher. He was in his twenties and new on the faculty that year. She didn’t have his class and saw him mainly in the lunchroom when he was on duty as a monitor. “Everyone thought he was cute at first, and then when they got to know him, they thought he was weird,” she said. “My experience was different, though. I didn’t get over him.”

It was precisely his weirdness that Marissa liked. She was interested in science and planned to study physical anthropology and osteology—“bones and such”—in college. She had always been very shy, and she didn’t have much contact with boys. She had never been in a relationship. After three years of not caring much about how she looked when she went to school, she started wearing makeup and primping. At lunch, “I’d become more outgoing,” she said. “I wanted him to notice me and want to get to know me.”

One day she got up the nerve to ask him a question about chaos theory. He answered her and told her he was impressed with her query. From that point on, she felt more comfortable around him. It was the start of what she calls their “relationship in quotes”—
because it was “hardly a relationship, certainly not a romantic one.” She daydreamed about him constantly, her mind wandering in class. She’d think she see him looking at her in the lunchroom, then she’d chastise herself for being so stupid. “There was definitely an internal struggle happening in my head for several months, going back and forth between how perfect we’d be together and how stupid and foolish I was being about the whole thing,” she said. “But no matter how much I tried to talk myself down, I could not stop thinking about him. School, work, while I was driving, before I fell asleep at night.”

The developments of her crush on the teacher shaped her senior year. One day at lunch she and her friends were goofing around in front of her new laptop, taking pictures of themselves. She invited the teacher to join them, and he did, giving her images that she would return to again and again. At the end of the school year, she went to a school-sponsored party after the prom and spent most of the night talking to him. “I was in heaven,” she said. Her date, a male friend, asked if she had a crush on her teacher. “I said, ‘No comment.’ I figured it was so obvious, there was no point in lying.”

At graduation, she introduced the teacher to her parents, who invited him to stop by their house. “I was mortified. I had no idea why they would do such a thing,” she said. “Then my whole family walked away, leaving me waiting for the response. There was a really long, awkward silence, and then we both said goodbye and went our separate ways.”

On an innocent level, each stage of her crush echoed a “real” relationship. Marissa and the teacher connected over common interests. She became preoccupied, as do many people newly in love. The pair posed for photos. They spent an evening together at the after-prom party. She introduced him to her parents, who invited him into the fold. She fully understood that her love would always
be unrequited and why she was so wrapped up in him. “It’s like me trying to tell myself I want this,” she told me. “But I’m still too scared to go for it in real life. It’s a safe way to have these feelings without being rejected. Coming out of it I feel like I’ve gone through an experience in which nothing happened, but I feel like something happened. It’s a process that’s building up to me being ready to have a relationship.”

What stood out about Marissa’s experience was why she admired him—he taught science. His “weirdness” embodied for her what being into science meant. It was a kind of outsider status in the universe of her high school. The first turning point of her crush—daring to ask a smart question—connected her to that outside world. What Marissa went through is what Pickhardt would call an “identity crush”: unrequited love for someone who embodies what an adolescent wants to become. It’s the impulse at the heart of the status-leaping crushes on popular peers, authority figures, or celebrities. “Girl crushes” in the tween and teen years can be a tug toward lesbian sexuality, or a desire to be like the female beloved, or both. “Crushes are less an expression of the other person than they are an expression of self,” Pickhardt said. “You are projecting characteristics onto the person that you find powerfully attractive.”

The idea of identity crushes evoked the Jungian impulse described to me by several of my adult interview subjects:
I want this person because I want to be like him
. I thought of my own first experience of puppy love, for a boy named David whom I met at summer camp in Maine. I wrote to him often, far more than he wrote me. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near the renowned food bazaar Zabar’s, which sounded wonderfully exotic. At fourteen, he had an intellectual and cultural voraciousness that impressed me. He was a huge fan of Sting, and the literary references in the lyrics led David to read Paul Bowles and Goethe.
He saw a therapist and tossed off sophisticated phrases like “Freud would have a holiday with that one.” His father managed the career of a famous violinist. After I got a letter from David or spoke with him on the phone, I’d feel piercing envy. I was a dentist’s daughter in a small town so dull that kids gathered in the Grand Union parking lot for fun on Saturday nights. I went to the library and brought home a stack of books. My brother saw them on the kitchen counter. “Dream interpretation? Existentialism? Who does she think she is?” he scoffed.

My brother was on to something. I
did
want to be someone else. My desire for the boy from camp was entwined with a desire not to be subsumed by the boredom and smallness of exurban adolescence. My infatuation with him made me feel my life had taken a wrong turn. As a young girl, I’d been an avid reader and an involved student. In middle school, I began to spend hours gossiping on the telephone with friends and cared a lot less about my schoolwork. The specter of David (and he did seem to be a specter, as I dreamed about him often) made me want to be cultured and aware, to live in the world as he did. His obliviousness ended up hurting me terribly, but my feelings for him pushed me toward becoming someone I needed to be.

CRUSHES SEEM LIKE
they are about giving in, the self being subsumed—crushed—by yearning. But the identity-building aspect of crushes can turn them into expressions of power and resistance. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich heard the shrieks of Beatles-obsessed tweens and teens in the mid-1960s as the first stirrings of the sexual revolution. “It was rebellious . . . to lay claim to sexual feelings. It was even more rebellious to lay claim to the
active
, desiring side of a sexual attraction: the Beatles were the objects; the girls were their pursuers,” she wrote
in a 1992 essay on
Beatlemania. In this light, “crush” becomes an active verb, something girls
do
; they crush standards, social ideals, their own former notions of themselves.

A similar impulse of re-creation lies behind the teen crushes enacted online today, though teens’ meme-sharing and digitized quips don’t have the physical intensity of Beatlemania’s girl-packs. The crush has long been one of the guiding conceits of social media, as attested by the lore surrounding the horny geek founders of Facebook; they created a platform for college students to look all they wanted at their classmate crushes without anyone else having to know. As social media evolves, the looking is less undercover and more of an online performance. “Crush,” “girl crush,” “obsession,” and other terms of longing pop up frequently in tweets, blog titles, and hashtags, along with “fangirl” and “fandom.” Crushes are cool. Canadian film student Meghan Harper, in a blog essay that went viral called “Why I F**ing Love Teenage Girls,” defends the celebrity crush, often dissed as annoying or frivolous. A crush on a boy-band star allows a teenage girl to “develop her sexuality in a safe environment she can control.” It’s love without being felt up by a boy when she’s not sure she wants to be, or being pressured to text him naked pictures of herself,
which might later be used to humiliate her. Celebrity crushes are a form of what social scientists, since the rise of television, have called “parasocial interaction”: one-sided intimacy, at a distance, with someone famous. However compelling the fantasy,
there’s no significant obligation or responsibility.