From Denial To Obsession: The 4 Stages Of Liking Someone
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“Crushes” — did this word just take you on a trippy road down the memory lane? If you said yes, then I’m sure that you’re remembering those numerous instances in your life when you felt that kaleidoscope of butterflies fluttering in your stomach and you were left stammering like a baby when you saw your crush. And you have to admit that it’s true, crushes don’t just happen out of nowhere (unless you believe in the whole concept of love at first sight). They slowly grow on you and eventually, they take over your brain like an infection (nobody to blame here). And this infection ends up with you doodling cupid and connected hearts in your notebook (haven’t we all done this at some point in our lives?)
Just like love, crushes too, have their own stages. Therefore, to explain the frustrating, glorious, rewarding, and sometimes even heartbreaking journey that we undertake while we are crushing on someone, here are the four stages that we go through before we realise that we’re in love in them:
Stage 1: Observation
This stage is where the seeds of affection are first sown with the sudden splurge of emotions that you experience. Your eyes have landed on this cute guy who just walked inside the chemistry class on your first day of college. You instantly begin to assess him. By the end of the class you tell yourself, “He’s totally cute… great smile, perfect physique, and those grey eyes look like they’re smoldering my soul.” The next day you realize that you just cannot keep your eyes off him. You want to look at every little movement of his face so that it gets etched in your memory. And you have to do so without letting him know. You think in your head, “If I get caught, I’m just going to say I was looking at the clock above his head.” It might seem to you, that your brain is cataloging every tiny feature of his and committing it to memory. And when you’re done with that, you’ll find yourself saying his surname aloud and coupling it with your first name to see if it sounds awkward or not. The end result of this stage? You’ve given him full marks on your personal checklist and now you’re convinced he’s the one for you.
Stage 2: The Denial
This stage is where you convince yourself that you should not be paying so much attention to him because, one: he is already taken, or two: he hasn’t even noticed you once in this entire week while you’ve been staring at him throughout the class. Then you flip-flop and tell yourself, “He has a magnetic personality, therefore, the attraction. There’s no way that I am crushing on him. Yes, I love his eyes, so what? Okay, I even love the way he talks. Okay, I think I like him now.” (Let’s admit that your self-defense mechanism has totally gone for a toss now)
Stage 3: Acceptance/ Obsession
This is the stage where you both become friends. From sitting a few benches behind him, you’ve moved to the seat that’s right next to him. He starts to borrow your pen and in return offers you a drop back home every day after college. You’ve accepted your feelings for him by now and you know they’ve grown strong, extremely strong. In fact, you’ve become really close friends with him by now. But has your crush faded? Nope! This is probably the worst thing that could happen. It’s always a bad idea to make your crush your close buddy. Because chances are that it might never move forward from there. Your feelings have blurred the line between “just friends” and “potential boyfriend”; you are obsessing over him. At the same time, you’re not sure what to do next.
Stage 4: The End
This stage is the final stage that’s going to start with you confessing your feelings for him. Also, this stage can have three kinds of “the ends.”
- The Happy Ending: Where he reciprocates your feelings. You accept that you both consider each other as more than “good friends”. And chances are that you both might fall in love with each other.
- Let’s Be Friends: This happens even before you’ve taken the step to confess your feelings. An incident makes you realize that making him your boyfriend isn’t that great an idea. So, you just utter the words mentioned above to yourself and put all the butterflies in your tummy at peace.
- The Endship: You’ve blurted out all your feelings in front of him. He seems to be irked by it. He says he’s never seen you in that light. He goes ahead and banishes you even from the friendzone. This is the most hurtful end. Slowly, you make peace with the fact that he wasn’t your Mr. Right.
Most of us have been through this, haven’t we? It’s so amazing how a simple crush escalates into something so serious. I mean, we suddenly start feeling so strongly for a person when we had no idea that he even existed a day before. Some crushes are happy memories while some aren’t. But they are the most it thing in our young lives. Teenhood definitely wouldn’t have been interesting without them. Besides, in Olaf’s words – “Some people are worth melting for.”
How many crushes did you have during your teens? Drop the answer in the comments below.
