Crush can be a heady, intoxicating feeling. It can put a pep in your step, boost your self-esteem and awaken feelings that may have been dormant for a while. But sometimes crushes are unrequited and leave you heartbroken, and learning how to deal with the fallout is a skill worth honing.
The term crush is often used in a romantic context: to describe an intense, usually short-lived infatuation with someone you admire, like, or want to be with. Having a crush can also mean that you’re attracted to someone while in a committed relationship. Interestingly, although infidelity can cause a rift in a primary relationship, research has shown that attraction to alternative partners is not necessarily destructive or predictive of a future breakup.
Having a crush is an important developmental stage in the life of an adolescent or young adult, when they are becoming their own people and gaining the skills necessary to build stable relationships. It is, in fact, a precursor to the more severe productivity of adulthood, when a person will likely need to devote themselves completely to their job or other responsibilities, and will have to learn how to balance work and home.
In teen movies, the climax of the film occurs when the crush is crushed: the bus crash in Mean Girls, the accusation of theft in Titanic or the lost friendship in Lady Bird. The denouement (a resolved fight or a rekindled romance) then settles the unrest, allowing the protagonist to move on, grow up, and find stability, often in a dyadic romantic relationship where equality is assumed but rarely realized.
As such, having a crush can be both exciting and a bit nerve-wracking. It can ratchet up your hormones and give you that boost in confidence, but it can also be exhausting and debilitating if you’re left unrequited. This experience can also be a good time to practice your emotional resilience, and learn how to cope when you feel that jolt of adrenaline run through your body again in the future.
In the study, participants reported a variety of reasons for having a crush, but fun and excitement were the most common themes (see Table 4). They were also more likely to report positive benefits of having a crush than negative benefits, with a few individuals reporting that a crush provided an opportunity to fantasize, and others that it provided ancillary improvements to their primary relationship or a sense of novelty.