Swarming or falling in love: which is better?
I'm very fond of always. In the kindergarten, it was a boy who always dipped my long braids in the water colors and trampled on my castles in the sandbox. My mother said he was a ruffian, and that made him terribly appealing to me, so I would rave about him. So I can testify early on that it is true that women fly on bad guys. Recently, I was at a class reunion, and memories of the rapture of mature adolescence came up. And who was it? Prompt one that I described in my teenage journal as the "asshole of the class". He was arrogant and a bit rude, but since he also had his softer moments, I found him irresistible as the object of my absolutely abstract craving. At the class reunion, I learned that he is now a successful gynecologist, so guaranteed the object of many other ravings. But these were just finger exercises, the training camp for the real crushes that came much later in life, after my marriage. The discovery that emotional life can be an abyss, a bottomless deep ocean, with unpredictable storms, was a very big surprise to me. Marriage gives you a frame and anchorage, but it does not protect you from the feeling of innocence that always accompanies swarming.
Has anybody ever prepared us, whether we are married or not, happy or not, to the end our days will always rave about other people? To swarm someone is something completely different than to be in love with him, to have an affair with him or even to have one. When you're in love, you live for the possibility (or fact) that something happens between him and you. If you are sharp and have or want an affair, you have actively done something to make it happen.
Feeling that you might love is the drug that makes you high
A crush on the other hand is much more ethereal and something very delicious. All you need to do is to be open to the beautiful and exciting, and this thrill will give you rapture by leaping an invisible but powerful spark between you and a person you know you never, never, never never touch. If you did that, your crush would turn into love or sex or both, and then the inevitable mix of pain and joy and disappointment they bring with them. That would be the end of your crush that resembles a heavenly dream: when you wake up, it's over (even if you write it down, even if remnants remain like a delicious aftertaste - the dream itself is over). A crush is intoxicating, you're already happy when you realize that you're suddenly capable of totally irrational, wonderful feelings. In a crush, your love ability is the drug that makes you high without actually loving you.
But break with the theory, Let's look at some case histories. For me it came - as already mentioned - to a whole series: For a witty sexy colleague, who turned out to be gay. Recently I learned from a gay friend that conversely gay men can swarm just as easily for women. But I was not so lucky - my crush was not reciprocated, no, that lovely guy finally raved about my husband! Long did not last our cooperation. I've also raved about a highly attractive neighbor I've always seen from afar without ever talking to him. That changed one day (he asked me, "Is that your fucking car parked in my driveway?"), And that ended my crush. Then there was an interesting crush on a poet whose lyrics turned me on, and I almost felt like a teenage groupie when I asked him for an autograph. But at some point we became friends by a strange series of coincidences, and today it's more of a boring duty to meet him than something exciting. He has no idea that I used to swarm for him, and I forgot why. So it's with raptures: they're so fleeting that they can be gone with an eyelash-lash, especially if it's a telling one. You have to be careful with sulks and keep them at a safe distance from reality.
A friend of mine, Claire, had to learn this lesson in a painful way, in the riskiest environment for raving, at work. She is a real estate agent in a small agency and works with only two partners, both male.The younger one is cute, she says, but not sweet enough to fall in love with him. The older one, a married man in his fifties, whom we want to call Thomas, was someone she paid little attention to in the beginning: calm, reserved, always considerate. When she joined the company as a junior partner, he took her on a guided tour of some of the objects, providing orientation in her new field of work. And in one of those penthouse apartments with roof garden and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river, she suddenly noticed Thomas's beautiful green eyes sparkling in the dusk against an orange sunset. Inspecting from the perfect kitchen to the perfect open-air hot tub to the perfect bedroom, Claire almost forgot why they were there. If Thomas noticed anything, he did not show it.
Swarming means surrendering to desire from a safe distance
From this day forth her workday became exciting and agonizing at the same time. Even the thought of being close to Thomas regularly gave her an energy boost, and when she managed to see an object with him again, as a couple, she was in seventh heaven. At home, where things were tense between her and her partner Jack, Claire fantasized about how she and Thomas were looking for a home together. However, it would be a mistake to think that one could always use a rapture as an innocent tool to spice up one's life a little, like a feverish affair. If you have a crush, there is a limit you should not go over, and one day Claire did just that when she invited Thomas and his wife for dinner. She was so jealous of the naturally highly disagreeable wife that she made it as demonstrative as possible, how closely she worked with Thomas, how much she valued his expert opinion of the objects visited and that this was her dream job at all. It should not have surprised her that the next day Thomas asked her to look for another employer. (Maybe I should have mentioned that he was her boss and his wife was co-owner of the company.) The crush ended with a bang, but he also had something salutary: As soon as Claire left, she had forgotten Thomas. That was just because, she claims, that in the new office there's a guy named Tim, whose blue eyes will not let her go when they meet at the coffee machine.
A crush is based on the tacit understanding that no one owes anything to the other and nothing should happen in real life. Just like swarming for celebs who will never allow us to get close to them, but will not stop provoking us from a safe distance. My sensible husband understands that very well, he raves about Minnie Driver. I encourage him in that because I like the excitement I see in him when he hears her in a movie or hears a song from her. That reminds me of another song that Jennifer Paige sings about: "It's just a little crush / Not like I faint every time we touch" (I swear for you, it's not more / I do not fall, you touch me ). Exactly. And I totally love our plumber, Mr. Miles. Whenever the tap drips or the flush fails, I call him (the number I know by heart) and wait anxiously for when he comes. When he's not in Tenerife, where he spends half of his life sunbathing, he usually looks very sexy the same day, in a suit and tie. In this outfit he bends over the toilet bowl. What he finds in clogged toilets he elegantly describes as "rubble". He draws divine little diagrams of what's going on in our sewer pipes (or not), and talks about it like an artist. Simply ... irresistible.
