Hi! Hello! Welcome to your monthly free column. I hope you enjoy it – if you do, here’s where to click to receive another one in two weeks. Anyway, it’s time to check our DMs.
I've been in a happy relationship for a few years with a great, super sweet guy. However, this past year, I've developed a bit of an online friendship/flirtation with… my high school crush. Back in school, I was a little nerdy, and didn't date at all. I had a big crush on a guy, but he never really knew who I was. We now follow each other on social media, and this year he's been interacting with me virtually, responding to my stories and tweets. I haven't seen this guy IRL since we graduated, but a teen crush is hard to get over, especially when he finally seems to like you back. But the timing is so off – I love my boyfriend and my current relationship is going really well. Why am I still thinking about my crush from my teen years?
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I’d like to start by establishing where I’m writing this from, 11 months into the COVID-19 global pandemic (writing that out clearly for our distant future selves to laugh at, one day). I (24yo) live with my parents (62yo and 61yo), and we get on very well – we eat dinner together, watch TV together, and complain about our jobs together. But, ultimately, I am single, I’m quite unbelievably bored, and I live in my Instagram DMs. I’m stuck at home like all of my friends, so that’s where they go to remind me that I exist. It’s nice, I feel good whenever someone adds a fire emoji to my day. But it’s also a place where I have seen, to be blunt, approximately 95 percent of everyone I have ever been romantically or sexually involved with reappear at some point in the last year. Maybe we’d already been watching each other’s stories and occasionally gracing one another with a pithy comment for years before, or maybe they just decided to send a 💯 reaction to a photo of my cat at 9:45PM on a Thursday night as the first sign of communication in three years – or something like that.
My point? This year [for clarity, this letter was sent in November 2020 but I think we can agree that until we’re all vaccinated, it’s still 2020 somewhere], a lot of people have been in the DMs. I’m not saying this to belittle the fact that this guy reached out to you – I have no doubt that he’d been thinking about it for a while, and that it took quite a lot of time and courage to actually press send – but it’s also worth considering that, well, the future doesn’t feel like it exists right now. All he, you, we can do is play around with the past.
I feel strongly about this story because it’s something I 1) heavily relate to 2) have overthought because of 2.1) how fun it is 2.2) how pointless and infuriating it’s also felt. These people are often – in my case – on another continent, or in their own happy relationship, or so far flung from my own reality for a million other reasons that none of this, I think, is ever really destined to go anywhere. Yet there I remain, texting away. What else am I supposed to do?
If you weren’t tempted, I’d be needing to ask you for serious advice myself. I’m so glad that your relationship is going well (and during a pandemic? Do not let him go), but equally worry that you’re being hard on yourself about thinking about your high school crush. I don’t know how much you’ve been talking to each other, but however much it is, I really think the stakes are low enough that you should be able to enjoy vindication that this guy has finally realised what he missed out on all those years ago, and also just the novelty and the tiny thrill of the situation. There’s so little of that these days, it seems cruel to deprive yourself of it. I feel like it’s similar to when, if we’re sticking to social media etiquette, you post a painstakingly good photo of your face, and you then only care about the compliments given by people who have not yet proven that they would lay their lives down for you on a daily basis. Validation from people who love you is important, but validation from people who you thought hadn’t thought about you in years? That’s gold dust.
Love is precious, and it is rare – but, if your day-to-day pandemic existence is anything like mine, everything is so boring. Everything that you are at once lucky and unlucky enough to live with on a daily basis is inevitably going to suffer a little bit right now. By that I don’t mean that you’ll fall out of love (I obviously don’t know, but it sounds to me like you’re both much stronger than that), but because there is so little variety and excitement in the day-to-day, the sparkle of the love of your life, which is the only thing you have to look at right now, might seem a little duller. I’m not saying this means you are ready to be unfaithful, virtually or physically, but I think it then makes sense for your mind to wander, just a little.
I mean, I also think that the age-old idea of wanting what you can’t have will unfortunately always be relevant. What you do with this idea, this temptation, is entirely up to you (and if I can give you just one piece of advice, it’s to do as little as possible with any sudden urge until we’re out of the pandemic), but there’s no denying that it’s exciting to have another unexpected/unusual/forbidden offer just out of reach. I wish this wasn’t true, but it’s just so nice to feel wanted.
I think it’s important to reassure your younger self that, as you say, the feelings you had in high school really did matter, and they always will. Even if nothing comes of them, that first intense burst of feeling, of desire, comes to form your emotional makeup later on. With that I’m just trying to say: it’s not weird that this is on your mind at all! Just look at Jesse and Celine in the Before films – even one night can hold a lot of weight, years later. It takes them nine years to reunite, so I’m not saying you’ve got another three years of wondering what you should do, but, well, don’t make any rash decisions in 2023.
If you’re really thinking about changing things and weighing up the pros and cons of sneaking around with your high school crush, try and look back on the last few months spent with your boyfriend and look at all the ways he’s surprised you – and you’ve surprised yourself. If you can weather a global pandemic in the company of just one (1) other human being, that human being would have seen you, if you’re anything like me, at all-time lows. The context we find ourselves in makes, I feel, everything more difficult, claustrophobic, irrational, aggravating. While I have no doubt that you individually have been strong and resilient and a terrific housemate, it’s worth considering that your boyfriend, at this moment in time, has probably supported you in ways your high school crush, down to fortuitous reasons that might one day become deeper, never could.
Another thing worth bearing in mind is that this guy has only perked up in the last year on social media, after ignoring you in person until now. I’m so sure that you are caring, charismatic and interesting (I can see it in the way you write), but your high school crush is only seeing you right now through the way you’re choosing to present yourself on social media. This is something I always struggle to remember whenever I get carried away with someone validating me on the internet. They don’t see me when I’m being lazy, neurotic, jealous, selfish, depressed. They respond to the things that I hope will make me seem worth responding to. That’s not to say these things are not a part of me – but they’re not all of me. The person you should change your life for, I think, is the person who sees the whole picture. All of you, in a whole world. I don’t think the world we’re living in right now feels whole.
I’d like to remind you of a quote from 21 years ago that’s never been more relevant, I think. Philip Seymour Hoffman is playing a loose version of music critic Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, and he’s reassuring up-and-coming writer William the day before a big deadline, telling him about the danger of worshipping people who find him cool. “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool,” he says.
The lasting reassurance I want to leave you with is that you have done nothing wrong, and there is nothing to feel worried about. You deserve to have a little bit of fun where you can. What your high school crush is doing makes sense to me, as it’s something that keeps happening in my world, too. Every time it happens now, I try and distance myself from it just a bit more (I mean, I still get excited and my brain becomes the equivalent of this for about half an hour) and remember that there is a bigger picture, and that circumstances are forcing us to explore old dreams and impossible flirtations because the future just seems so far away right now.
I try and remind myself that we are in a pandemic, we are all bored, we all miss our past lives. I try to be kind to myself, and to whoever is Typing… on the other end of the line, too. There is no shame in just trying to feel something new again.
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Next time, we’ll be talking about dating apps and how to navigate the ripped-up rule book that comes with using them during a pandemic. It could have been written six months ago, but I really hope it still won’t be valid in six months time. If you’d like to write in to respond to this week’s letter, or to ask questions of your own, you can email me here.