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What Is A Crush?
By admin | October 21, 2008
I just got off the phone with a friend and asked her, “What do you think the energy of a crush is?” She said she never really thought about it. I’ve taken some time during the past few years to really think about it, aided by the practice of yoga, and studying nonviolence. Following are some thoughts I want to share.
Awhile back, I set out to write a song about a crush, and wrote “Evicted,” which tells the true story of a man who was crushed by a tree falling on him while he sat in his truck at a stoplight in Berkeley, California. Somehow, my song morphed from being about a crush to the actuality of a man being crushed and losing his life. I have long recognized a connection between crushes, and life and death: a strong early influence on my life is Thomas Mann’s book Death in Venice.
In high school, I wrote a song called “But I Wonder” in which I described my experience of crush feelings at that time. I had the sense then that to do something other than what was expected of me with “crush” feelings (i.e. get married, have children) would mean not fulfilling a duty that, frankly, I did not consider mine to fulfill. My understanding that this “duty” was not natural sent me willingly into outcast territory, as the lyrics proclaimed: “I’m talking dereliction….”
I see a crush is an opportunity to answer something that is asking for attention: an opportunity to heal. Crushes are feelings that can be gently held with the intellect (which is not just a tool for cutting). By learning to use one’s intellect this way, crushes can be understood as evidence of something needing to be accepted and integrated in ourselves. A crush is a call to arms - not arms as in weapons, but arms as in what we use to reach out with, to embrace.
Sexuality has been taught as dirty, wrong and bad by religion for thousands of years, only made “ok” via marriage and child-rearing. Hence, we do not recognize the beauty in, and import of, “crush” feelings themselves, and we have not been encouraged to intellectually explore such feelings. Instead, we have only the paths that have been laid out for us: get married, or be bachelors, swingers, cheaters, loose women. And, if we are not finding fulfillment in these choices, or not finding available partners, what then? Are we destitute, emotionally and physically barren, empty? Yet crush feelings abound, even without an answering call, which is why I believe they have a purpose beyond what we have been taught.
I recently watched the movie Nim’s Island, and the ending showed the exact opposite of what I think would bring genuine health into human relationships. To my understanding, the film attempts to reinforce traditional family values. In the film, there was an obvious imbalance in the main character: a female author who wrote novels featuring a male character who was very adventurous. This author herself was afraid to venture outside her own house. However, as the story unfolds, the distress of a motherless child motivates the author to make her way to a distant island to meet, not just the child who called for help, but what suddenly appears to be the author’s future husband - the child’s father. He also happens to be portrayed by the man who, earlier in the film, portrayed the author’s alter ego: It’s the adventure hero, now residing, instead of inside the author, and in her stories, in this man, the child’s father, her future husband….
I see another solution to the problem of imbalance: using crush feelings to help us integrate ourselves so that what is adventurous (manly) and what is home-oriented (womanly) in each of us would connect within our own hearts and heads, not be projected into another, no matter the gender. We are taught not to be whole unto ourselves, and this model is a foundation of traditional marriage. Meanwhile, spiritual communities attempt to bridge the gap created by this false notion with their further strained ideas of abstinence, or of “marrying Jesus” as Catholic nuns are said to do. (And, of course, priests don’t marry Jesus - and why not?)
In secular living, sexual energy is recognized as powerful, and abstaining from sexual expression is seen as able to help power accrue. I’m speaking of sports, when men are encouraged not to act on their sexual feelings so they can let their energy focus on the game, or the fight. But of course, once the game is over, the usual (”normal”) behavior is again encouraged.
I’m suggesting that we accept our crush feelings, share them, enjoy them, and allow sexual energy to accrue to inform us. Crush feelings can open us up to engage our deepest thinking, as well as our deepest animal pleasure centers, and we can choose to unite these with our caring hearts. The fruits of such integration would mean experiencing harmony and love, not free from conflict, but harmony and love that never leave the stage even when conflict is present.
I question the traditional marriage and family model as the best form of human social organization. Would there be so much unhappiness and violence in our world, and in our homes and relationships, if the model worked for all? There is no doubt another system of organization more aligned with our natural rhythms than the system we have known for thousands of years that has been imposed on us for as long as history has recorded our violent tendencies.
So: how to begin this integration process? Is it possible to talk to someone for whom these feelings arise, without expecting or wanting to act on the feelings in the usual ways? This reminds me of a skit Margaret Cho does: “Your daddy, he gay,” Margaret imitated her mother saying, and she told the story of her father and his best friend, I think his name was Bill, whom Margaret’s dad punched out after Bill told him he loved him.
Yes, there is risk in this proposition of transparency. But I genuinely think that if we can begin to have such dialogues, between and across gender lines, this integration I am talking about can happen in each and all of us. Then, our selves, and all of our relationships, could become truer, and we would be able to live in greater harmony in the world.
A crush, then, is a window into the soul. And, as that ancient Chinese proverb says:
If there is light in the soul
there will be beauty in the person
if there is beauty in the person
there will be harmony in the house
if there is harmony in the house
there will be order in the nation
if there is order in the nation
there will be peace in the world.
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