• ComradeKaz
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    1 year ago

    Using an old account for this for obvious reasons.

    I have a crush on my coworker. I am also married so I hope it goes nowhere (I would absolutely never make the first move; for it to “go anywhere” she would have to make the first move and I’d have to have a moment of weakness).

    I feel awful about this. On one hand it’s tormenting me bc society raises you to believe that you’re supposed to fall madly in love with someone, marry them and then be completely incapable of feeling anything for anyone else for the rest of your life. On the other hand, having a crush is a rush of feel good brain chemicals when you interact with them, so part of me doesn’t want it to go away yet.

    Posting this bc the research I’ve done says that this is normal, but I never see it talked about, which made me feel even worse at first. Hopefully someone struggling with this too sees this and knows they aren’t alone.

    • david@feddit.ukOP
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for your honesty.

      There was someone at my old job who I sometimes felt like she was flirting with me, but I’m very sure she’s just nice to everyone and has learned from early on that if you look at men a certain way and talk to them a certain way, they tend to hang on your words and want to help you out. She is very pretty, engaging and fun, but that was the beginning and end of it. Younger me would have been completely and utterly smitten but by the time I met her I could tell what the score was.

      • ComradeKaz
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        1 year ago

        I don’t even think she’s flirting with me, but I feel connected to her for some reason. Ig it’s bc we bond over our mental health struggles, and I don’t know many other people who are comfortable with being as open about it as she is.

      • ComradeKaz
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        1 year ago

        Believe me, when I first caught feelings I did everything I could to convince myself that it wasn’t real. I have a mental disorder (being vague here on purpose) that makes me process crushes differently than people without it, so I hung onto that for a while.

        • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.com
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          1 year ago

          No need to be vague about mental illness. I am pretty open about mine as I’m bipolar. Mental illness is a no-fault condition and should be neither shameful nor taboo.

      • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.com
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        1 year ago

        At this point if I cannot see the humor in life, I’d be suffering from even worse depression than I do already. But thank you for your kindness!

  • david@feddit.ukOP
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    1 year ago

    There was a girl at school I was friends with who I had a crush on for a few years. We did a liiiittle bit of flirting with passing notes and she was very kind but never took an interest in me romantically. I wrote her lots of poems which she was very nice about and I was in love, but it went nowhere. She ended up dating some other guy in our year group and I thought “what does he have that I don’t?” but the heart wants what the heart wants. I don’t regret it. It was a happy non love affair I think.

    I actually ended up dating a girl in the year above me and she was awesome while it lasted but she left home and our relationship didn’t survive the distance.

    In the end I eventually married someone from work but it took us a while to get together because we both thought the other one was out of our league. We got together on the way back from an Ed Sheeran concert!

  • cybercitizen4@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I had a crush on a girl during the last few months of my last semester in undergrad (we were both going to grad school in different states). Beautiful and smart, we talked a lot during class discussions, we texted each other once in a while. This girl had me daydreaming while driving and cheesing hard while singing to pop songs with the windows rolled down. So I decide to ask her out. We meet up at a coffee shop, turns out the coffee shop is closed but we walk over to an ice-cream shop and talk and flirt for hours. We hug goodbye and I’m beaming on my way back home. We continue texting back and forth for a few days and I decide to ask her out once again. I ask if Saturday works for her and she replies that she’s going to be celebrating her third anniversary with her boyfriend on Saturday but maybe Sunday would work. I had no idea she had a boyfriend, so needless to say, that went nowhere. Or rather, we both went our separate ways and I’m still considering reaching out once I’m done with grad school.

  • surrendertogravity@wayfarershaven.eu
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    1 year ago

    My high school and college journals are filled with so much angst about crushes and “do they like me? don’t they like me?” that it’s physically difficult to re-read them now, hah.

    I had a crush on a redhead from about 10 until I left for college (it was a small town), then crushed on the various guys in my dorm and friend group (and one hot artist girl in a philosophy class) until I decided I needed to practice dating in junior year and actually went on a few thanks to Tinder. Though I didn’t escape entirely as I had a couple crushes on regular customers when I worked in an art supply store after graduating.

    Now I’m happily partnered and do not miss the mental anxiety of crushes, though there’s a twinge of excitement in the idea of having a crush that will always be nostalgic.

  • heavyboots@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    So I reconnected with an amazing woman I’ve known since sophomore year in high school during the pandemic and we’re fell back into being really close friends supporting each other during pandemic isolation. I believe the attraction initially went both ways and if I’d been willing to travel a LOT we could have possibly tried for a long-distance relationship. But none-the-less, we are still good friends to this day, although it kills me a bit to watch her go from bad relationship to bad relationship just because they are all local rather than 800 miles away, lol.

    • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.com
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      1 year ago

      She never did anything for me. I dunno why. I am more into the “imperfectly beautiful” look myself - like Hillary Swank and Cheryl Crow. To me, “perfectly beautiful” is smoking hawt!

  • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me
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    1 year ago

    Primary school, dominant girl, proto-bdsm (non-sexual) stuff. Reconnected many years later, while it was a huge thing for me, she didn’t even remember :D kinda crush, I guess.

  • datendefekt@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I am born German but didn’t grow up there and couldn’t even speak it until I was about 16. Anyway, there was this was girl I crushed so hard on. Mysterious, long black curly hair. Couldn’t muster up the courage to talk to her, but we had some common friends. And they told me the girl would also like to get to know me.

    Thanks to them we arranged a date, but Ms. Mysterious didn’t show up. And afterwards she just ignored me. Of course I was an absolute wreck and couldn’t understand what the problem was.

    So I asked our friends and they said, poor kid don’t you realize why? No of course not? Well, she’s Israeli, you’re German, her father found out and put an end to it.