I Was So in Love. He Wasn’t Even Cute.

 

Young me added romantic lighting, background music, and several attractive features that reality never provided.

When I was young, I had a crush on somebody.

Not a small crush either.

I was completely convinced that this boy was special. My young brain apparently looked at him and said:

Yes. That one. Let’s lose all dignity over that one.

I did ridiculous things just to get his attention. At the time, everything felt serious, romantic, and possibly destined by the universe.

Looking back now, I have only one question:

What the fuck was wrong with me?

He was not even that cute.

Childhood Eyes Cannot Be Trusted

Have you ever remembered an old crush and wondered whether your eyesight developed later in life?

Because I swear the person I remember loving and the person I now remember seeing are not the same individual.

Young me thought he was fascinating.

Adult me looks back and thinks:

Him?

Are we sure?

Was there nobody else available?

Did the school have a temporary shortage of boys?

I am not saying he was ugly. Let us be respectful.

I am simply saying my level of devotion and his actual appearance were not mathematically equal.

My feelings gave him a dramatic glow that reality apparently forgot to provide.

A Crush Adds Its Own Special Effects

When you like someone, your brain becomes an unpaid marketing department.

A normal smile becomes unforgettable.

A basic conversation becomes meaningful.

Eye contact lasting half a second becomes proof of a deep connection.

He says, “Can I borrow a pen?”

Your brain hears:

“I have chosen you from everyone in this room.”

No, Ruth.

He needed a pen.

But a crush does not care about facts.

A crush takes ordinary behavior, adds romantic background music, improves the lighting, and turns a completely average person into the main character of your emotional drama.

He did not become more attractive.

My imagination simply gave him a free upgrade.

The Embarrassing Attempts to Get Attention

Young people do strange things when they have a crush.

You suddenly appear wherever that person happens to be.

Not stalking.

Just repeatedly experiencing extremely convenient coincidences.

You talk louder when they are nearby.

You laugh harder than the joke deserves.

You pretend not to notice them while carefully monitoring whether they notice you pretending not to notice them.

You may change how you dress, how you walk, or how you behave.

Sometimes you tease them.

Sometimes you act completely uninterested because apparently the best way to show affection is to behave as though you cannot stand the person.

Brilliant communication.

I remember doing things just to get his attention. I probably thought I was being subtle.

Children are never subtle.

Everybody may have known except the boy I was trying to impress.

Why Did I Like Him That Much?

That is the mystery.

What exactly did he do?

Was he funny?

Was he kind?

Did he help me with something?

Did he possess one good feature that my brain used to redesign his entire face?

Maybe he simply noticed me once, and that was enough for my young heart to begin planning an imaginary future.

When we are young, we do not always need a logical reason to like someone.

Sometimes a crush begins because a person sat nearby.

Sometimes they smiled at us.

Sometimes a friend said we would look cute together, and our brain decided to investigate.

Sometimes they were merely present during the exact week our hormones started behaving like unsupervised children.

That is all it takes.

My Standards Were Apparently Still Loading

Adult me has questions because adult me now has standards shaped by experience.

When you are young, you have not yet learned what qualities actually matter.

You may care mostly about whether someone is cute, popular, funny, mysterious, or capable of looking in your direction.

You do not think about emotional maturity, communication, responsibility, compatibility, or whether the person creates unnecessary drama.

You are not assessing a life partner.

You are trying to survive one class while wondering whether he noticed your new hairstyle.

My standards were not low.

They had not been installed yet.

Maybe It Wasn’t Really About Him

Sometimes a crush is less about the person and more about how liking them makes us feel.

A crush gives ordinary days a story.

You look forward to school because you might see them.

Walking through a hallway becomes an event.

A small interaction gives you something to replay for three days.

Your imagination creates excitement even if nothing is actually happening.

Maybe I was not deeply in love with who he really was.

Maybe I was in love with anticipation.

The possibility.

The fantasy.

The version of myself who might finally be chosen by him.

That sounds dramatic, but childhood crushes are dramatic. You can have two conversations with someone and suffer as though you are starring in a tragic romance.

He Probably Had No Idea

The funniest possibility is that while I was experiencing this enormous emotional journey, he may have been thinking about absolutely nothing.

I was analyzing glances, words, and moments.

He was probably wondering what was for lunch.

I might have gone home replaying one interaction.

He might not have remembered it happened.

That is the cruelty of a crush: one person is directing a romance movie while the other person does not know they were cast.

Maybe he noticed.

Maybe he did not.

Either way, young Ruth was working overtime for a position that did not offer benefits.

Why Old Crushes Become So Funny

At the time, the feelings were real.

That is important.

We laugh now because we have distance—not because our younger selves were lying.

Young me genuinely liked him.

She genuinely wanted his attention.

She may have imagined that this crush was important and unforgettable.

Adult me now has enough experience to understand how random attraction can be.

I can look back without the romantic special effects.

The dramatic lighting is gone.

The background music has stopped.

Now it is just a memory of a normal boy and a very confused girl behaving as though he were the final available man on Earth.

That is hilarious.

I Want to Question Younger Me

If I could travel back in time, I would not stop myself from liking him.

That crush is part of my story, and the embarrassment is entertaining now.

But I would like to ask younger me a few questions:

“What exactly do you see in him?”

“Why are you walking past that area again?”

“Why did you laugh that loudly?”

“Do you understand that he is just a boy?”

“And most importantly—have you considered looking around?”

She would probably ignore me.

Young people rarely accept romantic advice from adults, even when the adult is literally their future self.

She would look at me and think:

You don’t understand. He’s different.

No, sweetheart.

He really wasn’t.

At Least I Can Laugh About It Now

There are old memories that still hurt.

This is not one of them.

This one makes me laugh because it shows how much I have changed.

The girl who once tried desperately to get one boy’s attention became a woman who would rather stay home with her computer than convince anyone to notice her.

That is growth.

In my previous post, Is It Okay to Have No Friends? Honestly, Yes, I wrote about how I once thought having many friends was necessary.

It may have been the same with crushes.

When we are young, being liked feels important. Being chosen feels like proof that we matter.

As we get older, some of us realize that attention is not the same as connection—and peace is better than performing for somebody who may not even be paying attention.

The B.S. Truth

Childhood crushes rarely make sense when examined by an adult brain.

We liked people for mysterious reasons.

We exaggerated their best qualities.

We ignored their ordinary faces.

We created entire relationships that existed mostly inside our imaginations.

And we did embarrassing shit just to get noticed.

But maybe that is what makes those memories so funny.

We were learning attraction, confidence, rejection, and desire without knowing what the hell we were doing.

Young me was not stupid.

She was inexperienced, dramatic, and temporarily blinded by hormones.

Still, if I could speak to her now, I would gently place a hand on her shoulder, point toward that boy, and ask:

“Are you absolutely sure?”

Because dude…

He was not even that cute.

B.S. or Truth?

Have you ever looked back at an old crush and wondered what you possibly saw in them?

What embarrassing thing did you do to get their attention?

And if you could talk to your younger self, would you support the crush—or tell yourself to open your eyes and find somebody else?

Tell me in the comments. Your younger self already embarrassed you, so you might as well make the story useful.