Well, it seemed so to me. I don’t know what else to call it. I stuttered in front of Jessica, couldn’t think, got confused, blushed, kept trying to ignore her but couldn’t stop staring at her, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, lost weight, thought about Jessica incessantly, had incredibly powerful and preoccupying sexual & emotional fantasies, went around buoyant or high on love for quite a while (intermittantly tempered with grief and despair), demonstrated poor judgement (sort of made a pass at her when she was straight, engaged, and a recently former student).
I suppose you could call all this stuff a crush, not love. Especially considering how little contact I actually had with her, how limited our interactions were.
However, the fact that it’s gone on so long (about 18 months for the physical symptoms and the emotional stuff still continues), and how strong my feelings have been, and how it’s lead me to make major changes in my life (get a divorce, return to the city, rethink what I’m looking for in a relationship), all this makes me think it was more love than crush. Unrequited love.
The danger in calling a crush “love” is in giving it too much weight, too much impact on your self-esteem, on your ability to see available others as attractive, too much emphasis on over-interpreting fantasy. However, there are also dangers in refusing to recognize love when it is there. It’s emotionally dangerous to deny such an important emotion as romantic love when it happens to you because you’re too intellectually focused to feel it, or because you can’t risk the shame of acknowledging it if the love is not returned, or because it seems unacceptable or unwanted in some way. This kind of emotional tyranny may result in a pretty narrow life. Which is just what I’m trying to avoid. I’m trying to move away from making conventional choices simply because that’s what others say we should do, trying to move away from filtering emotions through a maturely reasoned set of accepted worldviews. I suppose this is at least one reason why I call my feelings for Jessica love, and not a crush.
