For Successful Long-Term Love, Embrace Your Crushes

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After an encounter with someone on the periphery of your life, you may be given to imagining how wonderful they are, how their gentle confidence and remarkable jaw line are suddenly very desirable. Yes, you have a crush. “Airports, trains, streets, conferences – the dynamics of modern life are forever throwing us into fleeting contact with strangers, from amongst whom we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but more powerfully, the solution to our lives.” A crush demonstrates the ability of the human mind to fill in vacant details. From a few physical cues, your mind propels you toward a future with another person.

What’s the Big Idea?

A crush also reveals to us the expectations of modern love, i.e. that your partner be a constant source of inspiration and romance, because we seldom stop to acknowledge that the object of our crush is a real person, with a real personality, which necessarily has very real flaws. “Maturity doesn’t suggest we give up on crushes. Merely that we definitively give up on the founding romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of relationships and marriage has been based… A mature understanding of the madness of crushes turns out to be the best and perhaps the only solution to the tensions of long-term love.”