LOVE...... EXCITING AND NEW......

Pin It My husband keeps telling me that I should write about my own hopeless crush, but the sheer volume of crushes I talked myself into makes that almost impossible. I think I had a crush on someone every year of my life, almost always with semi-tragic results - a tradition that kicked off with Michael in the fifth grade.

I was such a boy crazy freak. I don't know where it came from. Maybe too much Love Boat. (Disturbing fact: back in the day I thought Gopher was "so fine." GOPHER.) (shudder)

When I was twenty I fell madly in love with one of my best friends and spent the next year covertly trying to make him fall in love with me. When that didn't work, I wrote him a long passionate letter explaining how I felt. He wrote me back - a very sweet note, saying that he loved me as a friend, but gently letting me know that it was not happening - now or ever. I read it, cried over it, then decided the note obviously contained hidden meaning. Instead of it meaning that he was not in love with me, which is what it said, it actually could be interpreted to mean that he was TOTALLY in love with me and if I waited around long enough, ALL OF MY DREAMS WOULD COME TRUE. It was all in how you looked at it, really.

I decided that what I really needed to do was step it up to the next level (the level of being completely insane). I repeatedly demanded that he participate in long conversations all about why he couldn't just go ahead and fall in love with me because DUH, it was SUCH A GREAT IDEA. I was pretty sure I could eventually convince him to fall in love with me if I was persistent enough.

Me: But we're so perfect for each other.
Him: I like you a lot, but I don't like you in that way. Please, please stop it.
Me: OK. I get it. I do.
Me: But probably I should ask you again next week, right?
Him: (jams pencil into his brain)

One late night I went to the home of the bishop of my YSA ward (translation: leader of a church congregation for young single people). When he opened his front door I was standing there crying my eyes out. He invited me in, obviously thinking there had either been a) a murder or b) some kind of spiritual crisis I urgently needed to discuss.

I told him I had a terrible, terrible problem that only he could help me with, and that I really needed to talk to him RIGHT that second. He invited me into his family room, where I told him (between sobs) that my life was over, it was OVER, because my crush didn't love me back and never would, and he was seeing someone, and how would I ever get over this, and what oh what oh what should I DO?

You should've seen the look on his face. That poor man. (Being the bishop of a singles ward must totally suck.)

I have to hand it to him - he did give the advice thing the old college try, telling me that the kind of love you have to convince someone to feel for you would never make you happy. This is probably where I should've had an epiphany and recognized the wisdom in what he said, but at the time, I just thought he was nuts. Because OF COURSE it would make me happy. It didn't matter how it happened, it just mattered that it happen.

If I'd been a Harry Potter character I totally would've been Romilda Vane, trying to make Harry mine by spiking his punch with love potion. As far as I was concerned the whole concept of free will was for suckers who weren't trying hard enough.

Man. I was nuts.