Do You Really Adore Him or Are You Just Blind?
Crushes, unrequited love and everything in between.
Wonderful feeling isn’t it? When you think you’re in love and all that stuff?
My friends always called me the “logical” one in our group because I was the one forcing them to think unemotionally when any of them were going through relationship troubles or breakups. That is, until I started maniacally crushing on a random guy everyone loved.
My friends stopped calling me logical anymore because I went crazy. Reason didn’t matter anymore; what mattered was the twisting sensation in my stomach when he walked by or talked to me. Being the shy one, I couldn’t initiate anything and this dude whom we shall call Tom, remained a mysterious figure that I couldn’t get over, mentally and emotionally.
I cannot say that by the time that entire fiasco of unrequited affection (which lasted almost a whole year) was over, I did not learn anything. Out of the haze that had clouded my so-called “logical reasoning”, I realised that when you crush on someone, you make them a fictional character.
Let me explain. I idealised Tom into the person who would have an easy conversation with me, understand what I felt and would ask me out simply because I had my fancies for him. But was Tom like that in reality? Hell, no!
Tom was awkward; I didn’t think it was possible to be more shy than I was, but Tom wrecked my beliefs. He fidgeted, did not know how to respond to my advances and at the end of the day I felt like a mad hyena hunting down a poor antelope.
It took me some time to come to terms to the fact that Tom wasn’t even who I had imagined him to be. I only knew him from the little bits I saw at public spaces and I forced those random pieces of the jigsaw to create the wrong image. I hadn’t even realised that I had wiped out his personality and replaced it with something new and unreal. While the silence from Tom’s end hurt me, the realisation that I had been blind for an entire year made me want to dig a hole and hide in it till Tom graduated.
I was in an illusion I cast on myself and it drove me mad. The obsession brought out parts of me I did not know existed. Since Tom was widely loved, it made me green when someone hit on him. I was angry when Tom kept me in the so-called ‘friend-zone’. And it hurt me more than it should when Tom did not text. Tom was probably startled and confused because no one could decipher my thought process until the haze lifted under the bitterness of reality.
That being established, next time someone pulls a Tom on me, I seriously don’t think any of my experience will make sense. Because we all have that optimist inside of us wanting to believe that every time is different. Fucking naïve rabbit.
