Frankie, if you’re out there, know that you’re an excellent memory. Know that Mary Beth Rosebrough — you knew her as just little Mary Beth, your Catholic-school classmate in East St. Louis — thinks fondly of the time in 3rd grade when you made her heart flutter.
You set the standard, Frankie: stocky, dark and handsome. All her boyfriends and her husband of 26 years, Dennis, have followed that pattern.
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It was you, Frankie, the first crush. You’re the one she remembers.
The crushes are always what we remember — the euphoria, the agony, the daydreams, the wedding plans, the hours of plotting required just to bump into them. We stutter and stammer; we blush madly; we wake up and fall asleep thinking about them; we desperately hope they’ll notice us.
They never get any easier. And you never stop getting them.
And that’s not a bad thing for humankind. “I think it’s almost programmed into us,” says Toni Coleman, a North Carolina licensed therapist and founder of Consum-mate Relationship Coaching.
“Because if it wasn’t really powerful, people wouldn’t necessarily pursue it. … [It’s] about the survival of our species.”
So it starts with a look.
“I remember walking through the concrete outdoor hallway of Cypress Lake Middle School and seeing a girl with big, red-frame glasses, long, brown hair in a ponytail, boxy, brown, Bass shoes, and jeans rolled tight at the bottom,” says Seth Fishman of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. “Instantly, I was smitten — the preppy princess!”
A heart flutter
Lois Ellis of Boynton Beach, Fla., was 8 and standing at the top of the five steps leading into her Philadelphia row house when a boy with wavy hair and dreamy blue eyes walked by. His name was Jules, and he was 10. She was hooked.
The look leads to a flutter of the heart, and tingles in your scalp. Maybe even a shortness of breath. Probably that’s why it’s called a crush.
Soon we’re going out of our way to see them. Nancy Mercier of West Palm Beach, Fla., was 15 when she became infatuated with a boy who worked at the barbershop next door to the dry cleaner’s where she worked.
“A coffee shop was next to the barber shop, and I would always offer to get refreshments for the other workers, for the opportunity to walk by the shop,” she wrote. “Standing straight, shoulders back and stomach in, I would smile broadly and toss my head just a bit as I passed by the shop’s plate-glass window.”
If only we could talk to them! In our minds, they are perfect, they are wonderful, they always say the right thing, they understand us perfectly.
“It’s almost like a fantasy video game,” said Karen De-Mars, Chicago-based co-founder of www.ecrush.com. “You just are playing in your mind. When you have a crush, it’s that little zing of fantasy.”
We plot and scheme to talk to them. Jessica Nuza Loflin of Boynton Beach developed an instant crush on a guy named Kevin, whom she spotted across a Washington, D.C., bar. “One friend hatched a plan and cornered him as he left the bathroom,” she recalled. “`This is Jessica, and she thinks you’re adorable!’ she said.” They became friends, then parted when he moved away. Her heart broke just a little.
Sometimes, the fantasy makes us talk ourselves in circles. We spend hours waiting for them to notice us, then spend even more hours scrupulously analyzing the significance of just a glance.
Lisa Cox of Boynton Beach was 15 when the cutest boy in the world walked into her afternoon study hall. She spent all hour hoping he’d turn and look at her, but he didn’t. She told herself when he talked to another girl that he was asking about her.
Crushes make us do silly things. They make us babble and blush. They make us stare at the ground and wish we could think of something to say. Sometimes, it’s embarrassing to remember.
Reaching out
Claire Parsons of Lake Worth, Fla., was about 14 and smitten with a boy named Kevin who worked at the arcade. She rode her bike there and sat dreamy-eyed at the food counter. He was so cute. So she wrote out the lyrics to Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You” and gave them to him. Kevin, unfortunately, did not honestly love her. The crush was unrequited.
Barbara Weisser of Boynton Beach had such a big crush at age 14 on the singer Fabian that when he came to the opening of a Jersey City, N.J., Dunkin’ Donuts, she got close enough to jump on his back. And did. And held on so tight that she had to be hosed off.
Crushes make us act silly and sometimes they hurt. They’re such an internal thing, a fantasy woven in our minds.
“We think of a crush as `I feel this way, but they don’t,”‘ Coleman said. “It’s sort of the assumption we make, kind of like I’m in this alone.”
Having a crush is, on some level, an act of pining, hopefulness tempered with a sense of futility. What if they don’t feel the same way? Sometimes, we just get over it. Sometimes we say something. Sometimes we learn that they don’t feel the same way, and that’s just painful.
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Marianne Musella of Boynton Beach had a crush on Bob, a “tall Nordic god.” In fact, they even dated for a long time, but it never stopped feeling like a crush to her. She always felt the flutters and tingles when she was around him. She thought he might propose, but he didn’t, and “it still hurts 34 years later,” she said.
Crushes don’t always work out. Sometimes, the fantasy is better. Sometimes, we actually meet them, and talk to them, and find out they’re boring, or mean, or they looked better from a distance.
Sometimes, though, they do work out.
The feeling stays
Through a mutual friend, Alan Levine of Boynton Beach met a girl who was shy and quiet, but he “was instantly captivated by her elegance and a luminescence that radiated from deep within her soul.”
His crush was immediate.
“I think a crush makes you feel like, `OK, my heart’s beating, I’m happy to be alive,”‘ DeMars said. “It makes you feel like, `I’ve still got it.”‘
So our crushes are the ones we think about, whether they ever knew how we felt. We remember the crushes.
So Frankie, if you’re out there, know that you made an 8-year-old’s heart beat just a little faster.