152: Crush
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From WBEZChicago and Public Radio International, it's American Life, I'm Iraq Glass. My name is Marlene. I'm a senior at Lakeview High School and I've had a crush on this one guy for four years. At first, it was like, "Okay, he's cute, yeah, let me get to know him." And then after a while, it's, "Okay, really know you and you really know me, so do you like me kind of, you know, like giving out hints, but not really saying anything." And then it goes into the like, "Okay," and trying to, like, when you walk down the hall trying to touch hands to see if you'll actually grab your hand and stuff like that. I mean, there's times where it's like that and you know he doesn't like you, but then, then there's times like this one time I sneeze and he looked at me, he goes, "You know, you have a really cute sneeze." And it's like, "Oh my God, you know, what are you doing to me?" You know, 'cause it just told me, "Make signals." With a crush, everything is more intense. Everything your crushy says and does is frayed it with such meaning. I was all day on that sneeze comment, "Okay, I was told every single one of my friends." And it's just like, I was like, "Man, this is stupid little, you have a cute sneeze thing." You know, and I was, "Yeah, I was like, "Man, okay, get over it, get over it, no big deal." But it was the highlight of my day, man. Having a crush, anybody knows, means being utterly miserably dejected and completely filled with hope at the same time. After four years of an on-again off-again crush on this guy. Just last week, Marlene started seeing somebody else. And she says that compared with dating, a crush is better in certain ways. "The whole, you don't know who he is and you don't know if he likes you and that kind of like trying to bump into him every day and stuff, you know, but when you start dating somebody, it's just a normal thing, you know, it's not something spontaneous. If you have a crush, you do anything just to be in his way and it's just a lot of spontaneous exciting thing, you know. You have a boyfriend. It's just like, "Okay, yeah, okay, it's three o'clock, I see you now." Well, today on our program for Valentine's Day, stories about love in its earliest stage, crushes what's terrible about them, what's great about them, and how they can overshadow a real love for some people. Like one of our program, "Kiss," Tobias Wolf has the story of a crush that lasted a lifetime. Back to how a bill becomes a president in which a press secretary for a major presidential campaign explains the dynamics of crushes that are not about love, but about politics. Back three, one seeing the 100% perfect girl one April morning, in which one lonely crushy finally figures out what it was that he wanted to say, what we all want to say, as the person of our dreams passes us on the street, stay with us, equine, kiss. So what if you held onto a high school crush, under what conditions would it never go away? Tobias Wolf has this short story. When Joe Reed was a boy of fifteen, his craziness over a girl became such a burden to his family, and such a curiosity to the small town where they lived, that his mother threatened to pack him off to his married sister in San Diego. But before this could happen, Joe's father died, and his mother collected a large sum from Northwestern Mutual, and sold the family pharmacy, and moved both Joe and herself to California. Thirty years passed.
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