The first week of class symbolizes many things. For some, it entails the loss of freedom or the fear of procrastination. Others can barely contain their joy, prepared with colorful pens, an overwhelming amount of post-its and enough highlighters to paint an entire textbook. I am one to stress about everything during this part of the semester, ranging from my outfits to figuring out if I have to run from one building to the other to arrive on time. Knowing this about myself, I look for healthy ways to distract my mind while still being attentive to my role as a student. Let me tell you, there is nothing more entertaining during that first week back than picking out a crush in each class.
Say you take four classes and in each of them you have a crush. That’s practically a script for a reality show! Who are you giving the rose to? It’s genius and you barely tiptoe around the risk of focusing too much on any one of them. However, it is called a crush, so you should always brace yourself for impact. One day, you’re all calm and collected, then out of nowhere you see one of your crushes kissing someone else and you’re forced to grieve the loss of a potential storyline. No slow burn romance, no enemies to lovers storylines, no being forced to work on a project together. When you least expect it, you find yourself crying over a person that wasn’t even that high on your list of love interests.
Let’s be truthful, crushes are inevitable. They happen all the time and the cruel thing is, the more we deny them, the more they grow into their own thing. We begin to lose control and the possibility of getting hurt increases. At least, this was the case in high school, when we would grow accustomed to seeing the same people five days a week for several hours. It was far too easy to be hung up over anyone and build expectations under the false pretense that we knew them.
But having crushes in college? Groundbreaking and necessary. There is something exhilarating about these types of interactions during this chapter of our lives. Unless you are friends with someone and make plans to see them, the people in your classes essentially fall off the face of the Earth and only resurface for a limited time two days a week. This only adds to the mystery and leaves room to create fake scenarios that keep your mind active while you try not to fall asleep in front of your professor. It offers endless material for your imagination to go wild. In moments like these, crushes are indeed the powerhouse of the cell and don’t allow anyone to tell you differently, not even a science textbook. They become a motivator during each semester, heck, I’d even argue that they help with attendance. I can’t be the only one who saw missing class as missing an opportunity to have my badly written Wattpad romance come to life.
Crushes can be triggered by so many factors, it’s nearly comical how random they are, sometimes we can’t even justify them to our friends. These spontaneous obsessions where we stress over finding the perfect picture of them to show others and end our arguments with “they look better in person.” I attempt to understand the science behind these often short-lived infatuations we have with certain individuals, but trying to apply logic is a guaranteed migraine. Sometimes you like a person’s crocs and then you look up and say “Wow! The owner of these shoes is cute!”, and then you spend an entire semester fixated on them instead of your degree.
The less you see them, the more space you have to idealize what kind of a person they are. It caters to what you subconsciously want. Before you complain and say that it’s wrong to construct an image of someone, we always do that. There is always a version of what a person could be like in our heads, and this is only compromised once we begin to communicate with them. That isn’t always the case with a crushーin some cases, some of us simply thrive off the chase.
You know what I mean. Yep, I’m talking about the shared glances that make your heartbeat a little faster against your will, yet you are too shy to make direct eye contact out of fear of acting like an idiot. The nervousness that comes with hearing them participate in class, as if they were to magically address you while talking about some novel that less than half the class took the time to read. The process of picking out an outfit in hopes of catching their eye, only to sit through attendance and realize that they ditched class. Your blushing cheeks when you say something wrong during a discussion because you want them to think that you are the smartest in the room but in a humble way. Notice that this is all mostly non verbal communication. Yeah, these simple yet magical situations that can all come tumbling down after one conversation gone wrong with the object of your affection. Some say never meet your idols, I say never speak to your crushes.
That’s why having a crush in each of your classes is a solid plan. It could backfire because this means that at the end of the semester, you’re going to have to recast multiple roles, but you never had a boring moment. It’s like a film with alternate endings. All in all, one of the things that makes college life great is the variety of individuals that we meet and how special they can become for us. Crushes can be fleeting, but the memories that are left behind will make for funny stories to share. We remember our actions and how silly they seem in retrospect, but we can’t help but feel grateful for the experience.