A Lifetime of Romantic Crushes

I was victimized by my first romantic crush when I was six years old. The girl and I were classmates in kindergarten and the 1^st grade. I will not divulge her name, though I still remember it. She had shiny, curly, brown hair, and she wore pretty dresses. Several other boys had crushes on her too. I don’t specifically recall, but I’ll bet she had a row of six year-old guys asking to push her whenever she perched herself upon a playground swing.

A year or two later I attended a different school, and I had a crush on a different pretty girl. Just like when I had a crush on the first girl, I did not know psychologically why I had this crush. If I were to be asked at the time, I would have instantly reply that I did not like girls. Girls were yucky, I would proclaim. Yet at any given time I seemed to fall under the spell of one girl or another, even when the girl was oblivious to my crush; and she always was.

I am now over sixty and yes, I can still be seized by a crush. In fact, the crushes I experience at sixty are oddly similar to the crushes I experienced at six. The girls are older but the feelings are pretty much identical. Over the years I have tried to analyze these crushes and I have come to the conclusion that two ingredients are required. One ingredient is some level of physical attractiveness. The mere presence of the desired female has to be able to spark interest. The other ingredient is simple mystery. There cannot be an over-familiarity with the quarry because if too much is known, there is no mystery, and it is the mystery that drives the imagination, which in turn creates the crush.

I think I am like every other healthy heterosexual in that I can get a crush on a member of the opposite sex while in a long-term relationship with someone else. When I fall prey to a crush while also in a relationship, I have a desire to act upon the crush, but I do not want to act on the crush, consequently I do not. This does not hold true for every person all the time, a fact that can potentially ruin relationships, even marriages.

Even during the times when I have been unattached I have never had the opportunity to become even slightly intimate with a woman with whom I had a crush. The reasons range from lack of confidence on my part, to good sense on her part. Anyway, I'm not sure what the endeavor would be like. My guess is that it would begin with gut-wrenching anxiety, and end in disappointment, so maybe I'm better off without the experience. 

Through all my years of romantic crushes there exists about a dozen real-life women who I have known well enough for them to pique my imagination, but not so well as to deflate the mystery they created. Now at age sixty-one the reminiscence of these approximately twelve women creates the odd blend of remorse, and appreciation. Sorry, but I’ll have to get back to you on the exact proportions of that blend.        

An Overlooked Milepost In Life

I don’t like to encounter any of life’s mileposts, at least not the later ones. Turning eighteen met with my approval, and graduating from high school still ranks as one of my favorites, but I did not like turning fifty, and that was over ten years ago. When I turned fifty I started getting “old folks” mail, and it did not amuse me. I received something from AARP about two days after my fiftieth birthday. It was as though the organization was a shark waiting for me to fall into the water at age fifty. 

Many of the standard mileposts I did not get involved in. I’m speaking of fatherhood, divorce, grandfatherhood, etc. I’ve been a bachelor all my life. I do have a “significant other” and we recently passed our 25^th year together. I guess that’s kind of an unofficial milepost. I’ve been waiting for her to ask for my hand, but so far she has resisted. That would be a big milepost.

Anyway, I’m now going to get to the point of this long-winded blog entry, and that is; one of my previous girlfriends died recently. She died of natural causes. I consider the deaths of friends and family members, mileposts. I now consider the death of an ex-girlfriend a milepost too. It's kind of an overlooked milepost, and it’s a milepost that does not come along expectantly, like a birthday or an anniversary.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know quite how to take this particular milepost. I haven’t laid my eyes on her in thirty years, so I’m not about to cry. But it is a little unsettling. It wasn’t a “going steady” high school-like fling. We had a full “adult” relationship that lasted about eight months or so. We did some traveling, spent a Christmas together, etc. Over the years I’ve thought about her on occasion and wondered how things were going with her.

When I heard that she had passed away I did an internet search using her name. I found her obituary, of course. I also discovered that she had recently done a brief interview for a small, local newsletter. There was no real reason for the interview. It was kind of a “meet you neighbor” thing. Anyway, she mentioned her kids, her hobbies, and where she had worked. And she mentioned a long-ago camping trip when we slept in a tent in a state forest. Out of her sixty years of life, she mentions that one excursion, spent with me. 

Like I said; I don’t know quite how to take this milepost, and yeah, it’s a little unsettling. I guess that's why we notice them when they come.