A crush is fun and can inspire us to live better. I noticed that I have a tendency to develop crushes on fiction characters. One of my longest lasting crushes is Dorothy Boyd from the movie Jerry Maguire. It’s not necessarily any physical characteristic that draws me in, it’s her personality quirks and her view of what love is. She is so uninhibited when it comes to loving someone that it would be impossible to be with. Hm…sounds familiar. Sounds a bit like me and my crush on a character that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I’ve come to realize that I can learn a lot about myself from the crushes that I seem to develop. Because it’s not a certain physical characteristic that I’m looking for, I can determine what qualities I’m looking for in a person who, well…actually exists. The information that I gather from the women I date ends up being more of a “what I don’t want”. Which, may or may not be more practical than a list of what I do what.
Where Tiffany and I seem to differ is that she claims that she must actually know the object of her crushes. But, if you are simply filling a void with fantasy it makes no sense to me that the fantasy has to be a real person. By definition, “fantasy”, is not real. If it was, it would be reality. Granted, there may be slightly more satisfaction to actually be in the same room with your crush than simply watching her in a movie. But what good does that do if you have no intention of acting on it? I have the added benefit of the delusion that I would act on my crush with the safety net of, “if only she actually existed”.
Photo courtesy anouchka @iStockphoto
I actually crushed on Jerry Maguire in that movie. He was the ultimate guy. Slightly bad boy, commitment phobe, and clueless but with love he turned around and figured it out. Quite the fantasy indeed.
I used to get crushes on lead role guys when I was a pre-teen… Parker Stevenson and Shawn Cassidy watch out LOL…. My daughter had her first crush on Robert Pattinson or whatever his name is from Twilight… his character is very sexy so I totally get it… of course her being little she didn’t understand. I thought he was sexy too and then I watched him on a talk show and as a mother was thinking “straighten up! speak up!” ha ha… so seeing the real thing just didn’t do it. I assume it is all the picture they show you on the screen – not the person, but the character.
[...] Comments « Filling the void with fantasy [...]
Katherine, I agree with you. Much easier to “crush” on someone you know everything about (the character) than someone you only see glimpses of (and those screened through his PR machine). In a strange way, a fictional character is more “real” to us than a celebrity, because he’s fully developed and we see many different facets of him/