Crushed

September 3

I get crushes.

I always have (well, not always-- since high school, probably somewhat earlier). For a while I was practically able to organize my life by crushes-- "Oh, yes, that was the period when I had a crush on that girl who worked at the ice-cream counter" or "I had a killer crush during those three months-- remember that woman in my Women in Literature class?"

Sometimes they're Platonic, by which I guess I mean not primarily lust-driven. My crushes don't usually have much to do with libido... certainly there's often a sexual element, but there are lots of people I find sexually attractive that I never had a crush on.

I should probably define my terms, but that's so difficult. Webster says a crush is "A short lived but intense infatuation," and that's reasonable enough as far as it goes... but what about those times I pursued those crushes and wound up dating them, sometimes for long periods of time? I guess once I started dating them they stopped being crushes and started being something else... So, okay. I consider it a crush when I don't know the person very well, yet find myself intensely attracted and drawn to them. My crushes aren't necessarily short-lived... there was a woman who used to come into Espresso News, a truly radiant person who bubbled with life and light and happiness, and I was enamored with her for months and months and months without doing anything about it... I'd probably still be as enamored, if I hadn't moved away. I probably never would have done anything about it. A crush has its own sweetness that's not necessarily tied to any hopes or anticipations. Crushes can be strangely pure.

Now I'm afraid I sound like a stalker or something-- I've never done anything like that. Sometimes I strike up friendships with the people I have crushes on (the ones I'm crushing? Oh, English, what a language!), sometimes I date them, sometimes I never even really meet them, but I don't snap photographs of them, try to learn details of their life through indirect means, or any other stalkerish behavior. I've known people who did stuff like that, and it's more than a little creepy-- it's objectifying, it's invasive, it's bad.

I used to write poems about people I had crushes on, but several years back I realized that, for the most part, that was a futile enterprise. After all, I don't know these people, so the poems aren't really about them-- they're about me, my reactions, my tastes. And while there's nothing wrong with writing poems about that stuff, they can get old and repetitive. So now I have an informal rule, no writing poems about such people until I know them at least a little, have some shared experiences with them, can put something that isn't totally me into the work.

I've developed a crush or two since coming to Santa Cruz. It's only natural. There are lots of people here who are lovely in personality, mind, and body-- often all three at once. The question is, will I do anything about these infatuations?

You all know about Meg-- some of you know me well enough to already understand my situation, but some of you readers may (possibly) be people who only know me via tropism (and my fiction and poetry, which of course you seek out and read voraciously). For those hypothetical readers, let me explain things... Me and Meg talked at length about our relationship, and what would happen to that relationship when I moved to the West Coast. Should we break up? Should we try to maintain a monogamous relationship over 3,000 miles of formidable geography? What to do?

We knew that having a monogamous relationship would be a miserable failure. I'd cheat on her, she'd cheat on me, there'd be guilt and shame and recriminations, almost inevitably. But we didn't want to end things, so we decided on a policy of open-ness. Neither of us is much burdened by jealousy anyway, we're both very young, so this wasn't a difficult decision. We're both free to date others-- indeed, we're encouraging each other to date. We're going to periodically re-assess our situation, see how we're holding up, romantically. She's visiting next month, I'm going to try to get home for Christmas, and we have plans for other visits. If one or both of us should fall ass over teakettle for someone else... well, it'll be sad but understandable, and our relationship is healthy enough that we'll be capable of feeling genuine happiness for the other. Change, after all, is the only constant.

There may be some scoffs at that. Some eye-rolling. Some snorts of derision. Well, sure. I'd probably have the same reaction, if I heard somebody say what I just said. It seems like a naive idea, born of romantic inexperience... but I'm not entirely unexperienced in such things.

Besides, you scoffers don't know me and Meg.

The point is, we're keeping our options open. If she graduates from college and we still want to be together as much as we do now, we'll be together-- she'll move here, I'll move where she goes, whatever. If our lives diverge in the meantime... well, we've always acknowledged that as a possibility. We went into this with open eyes.

So anyway, I have a couple of crushes. Women I see around town, purely surface attractions, but that's often the way great things begin, right? Great friendships, great romances (I was hopelessly enamored of my old girlfriend Adrienne within 2 seconds of meeting her)... I'm thinking of actually talking to one of the women I've developed a crush on. I haven't decided to do that... but I'm considering it.

Despite what my dear friend Scott says in the Bio he wrote for me, I'm not a player, not a smooth operator, not Mr. Charm. I mostly approach people I'm attracted to clumsily and tentatively, and I don't mean that I do that in a way that's calculated to be endearing. That's just the way it happens. I don't have pick-up lines, and I don't want any... such things aren't really true to my nature.

I'm quiet. I'm shy around people I don't know (though not shy at all around people I'm comfortable with-- at least I'm not a total social mollusk). I value my own privacy highly, so I always worry about approaching a stranger without invitation. Many of the women I've dated have been extroverts, and almost without exception they've picked me up. Not that I didn't want to be picked up... But I don't like waiting around for things to happen. Waiting around's not very true to my nature, either.

So maybe I'll do something about one of these crushes. Maybe I'll make a friend... or more... or at least make an effort. Even rejection wouldn't be so terribly bad... at least it wouldn't be a failure of nerve, it wouldn't be a failure to try...

I'll keep you posted. Probably.