Unrequited (21 page)

I watched my daughter dance. Her unruly curls were pulled back. The bit of makeup I’d allowed her brought out the outlines of the young woman she would become. She loved to
be onstage, loved the big colorful productions her performing arts program staged every spring.

I loved to watch them, but I had my qualms about this year’s show choice. The mermaid gives up not one but two essential parts of herself—her tail and her voice—to go after a guy who couldn’t even recognize her as his rescuer. The musical and Disney-film versions of the story make her sacrifice pay off. The prince returns her love, and the two live happily ever after. In the original Hans Christian Andersen version, the Little Mermaid is turned into sea foam for her troubles and evaporates into the heavens. She gains an immortal soul, which, in Hans Christian Andersen’s worldview, is the ultimate spiritual reward. From another vantage point, her end looks a lot more like suicide by unrequited love.

When my daughter was a preschooler, we talked about both versions of
The Little Mermaid
. “How about that,” I used to say in my Mommy-makes-a-little-fun-of-fairy-tales voice. “She gives up her beautiful voice, suffers great pain, and all for some guy who doesn’t even know she exists? Not smart.”

“Yeah. Duuuuh,” Clara would join in. It was part of our ongoing conversations about which princesses were smart (The Paper Bag Princess, The Princess Knight, and later, Merida in
Brave
and Rapunzel in
Tangled
) and not smart (Snow White, who not only talked to a stranger when there was a death warrant out for her but also
ate that stranger’s apple
).

Clara’s princess phase passed years ago. She has yet to be struck by her own romantic yearnings, though she comes home with reports about classmates’ crushes. A couple of girls claim they’ve already gone on “dates.” The inevitability of these feelings in her life has been very much on my mind as I’ve worked on this book. How will she handle it? How will
I
? The Little Mermaid embodies a main peril of unrequited love: self-sacrifice. I remain uneasy about
the prospect that one day, dreams of a prince—or, more likely, some clueless dude in her math class—might take over my daughter’s lively imagination.

Through most of her childhood, she’s largely tuned out boys, which is developmentally quite common. Children spend most of their time with same-sex peers. I was the same way. Boys weren’t on my radar until, all at once, around sixth grade, they were
.
It was a shock to my system to find myself so preoccupied with Danny, a boy with feathered-back dark hair in the style of Shaun Cassidy, the pop-culture It Boy at the time. I had spoken to Danny maybe twice. I did nothing about my feelings and told no one, but my emotions must have showed. One day I found a note in my locker saying, “Will you go out with me? Love, Danny.” My chest squeezed and my face grew hot, a beat before I took in the loopy handwriting, clearly a girl’s penmanship. My friend had written the note to tease me.

Part of me wished my daughter could simply skip this kind of humiliation. She is so self-assured now, with a healthy aversion to being treated poorly or ignored by her peers; she has an enviable aptitude for distancing herself from classmates, male and female, who aren’t decent to her. I can hardly imagine her feeling so vulnerable. My mom friends and I speak about the advent of romantic feelings in our daughters with some degree of dread,
The Little Mermaid
a cautionary tale: One day our daughters will feel as Ariel felt, pining over someone impossibly remote, distracted from school and family, and given, we fear, to sacrificing her voice. Voice—finding it, keeping it, cultivating it, using it—was the feminist metaphor for selfhood that guided us in college into our own adulthood. Crushes seem to threaten that process of becoming. And I certainly did not want my daughter to lose herself to someone the way I did.

But as I’ve unpacked unrequited love in these pages, I’ve been a steady defender of its essence. This fraught state can be a meaningful one, if we heed it carefully. Watching
The Little Mermaid
musical onstage, I was struck by one scene in particular: Ariel, surrounded by treasures salvaged from humans (including the iconic fork she uses to comb her curls), dreams of a life beyond her sheltered underwater existence. The song she sings, “Part of Your World,” is about her desire to rebel against her overprotective father, the king of the sea, and be “where the people are.”

In the classic structure of musical theater, “
Part of Your World” is what’s called the “I wish” song—when a main character declares what she wants, and this gets the story going. At this point, she is just
wishing
, the quintessential state of the adolescent girl. She wants to leave behind the constraints of childhood and transform herself into someone new. She wants to love and be loved by someone who represents these possibilities.

Ariel’s story moves on to fulfill her fantasy. She wins the impossible beloved and gets back her voice. Plenty of girls with a crush don’t get any further than the “I wish” song. They’re not going to get the guy. But the state of wishing can be useful. Closer scrutiny of the crush suggests that this fraught state does not have to be a threat to a girl’s emerging adult self. Unrequited love has the capacity to
enable
these emerging selves—as such, we may be better off viewing the crush not with trepidation but as opportunity.

THE WORD “CRUSH”
originated in the nineteenth century as a description for a crowded social gathering or a dance where
marriageable young men and women might jostle against each other and meet. In a time of stricter courtship protocols and gender segregation, crushes offered a chance for nearness and contact, the throngs of people offering a cover, a sense of the accidental,
for the moments when sleeve brushed sleeve or shoulder bumped shoulder. Such situations likely fostered deeper longings, the hope to bump into a specific someone—what we would consider a crush now.

Today the door to that crowded Saturday-night dance of yore is, in the virtual world, perpetually open, with the digital blurt of a chat message alert or text often serving as that first spark of flirtatious contact. A teen outside of Boston told me that when she was in middle school, she jumped on her laptop every day after she got home. As she picked away at her homework, she maintained at least half a dozen chat conversations with her friends. She knew she wasn’t focusing as well as she should on her assignments, but she couldn’t force herself to close the IM program. “If my crush was online, I would stay to see if he would chat with me,” she said. When she was in high school, the explosion of social media apps made analyzing romantic intentions even more complicated. Pressing “like” on five Instagram photos of a peer became code for being attracted to the person. Flirting and arguing took place over “subtweets”—enigmatic 140-character announcements (“I finally feel someone understands me”; “I hate being ignored”) aimed at one person, yet tweeted out to hundreds of peer followers. “Relationships and crushes have gone very public in one way, and then in another way, they’re under the radar because people don’t show their affection as much in person,” she said.

Taking seemingly private communications about yearning and disappointment into the social media thicket can serve different purposes for young people with crushes, according to Ilana Gershon, an anthropology professor at Indiana University who’s often referred to as an “Internet ethnographer.” In the interviews she conducted for her book,
The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media
, she found that for some people, social media
announcements about their romantic intentions and disappointments helped minimize their vulnerability. “If you’re not saying it directly to a person, then you’re not forcing them to own it or to respond. You’re introducing a certain amount of ambiguity,” she said. Other people are motivated by an opposite impulse: the need to make their feelings “as important as possible by having other people called forward as witnesses, who have to engage and respond and support you.”

Historically, new communication technologies were introduced along with clear protocols for how to use them. When the telephone became available to consumers, companies hired people to monitor conversations. They even sent letters reprimanding women who talked too long. “Now we don’t have anyone to tell us what’s appropriate and inappropriate,” Gershon said. The five-Instagram-photo-rule my teen source mentioned became flash policy for her peer group, but it may not apply elsewhere. A girl who texts with her boyfriend throughout the day thinks of what they’re doing as part of an expected conversation that is “
never
over,” even after he has told her he needs a break from the relationship; their steady digital connection somehow doesn’t figure in, even as it disrupts
the distance he has said he wants. “I have a lot of sympathy for young people because they’re learning how to manage what it means to love as they are learning what it means to communicate using these technologies,” Gershon said. “No one has the same shared expectations.”

WHILE THE DIGITAL
world that stokes teen crushes may be new, the feelings underneath are not. The adolescent crush is an expected rite of passage. Since the early 1900s, psychologists have recognized the developmental validity of puppy love, teacher and camp counselor crushes, and zealous same-sex adolescent friend
ships (particularly among girls in single-sex schools), characterized by expressions of undying commitment, affection, and fierce jealousy; most youths, these early researchers reassured,
would move on from these “homosexual attachments” as they grew older and had more exposure to the opposite sex. Today’s psychological literature on crushes in childhood and adolescence continues to see the unilateral romantic fantasies of the young as stalwartly normal
.
Nearly every girl has had at least one crush by the age of fourteen. Girls start crushing earlier than boys because girls hit puberty sooner, a time when romantic fantasies and desires fire up. These early crushes are part of a time of transition, when kids go from virtually ignoring the opposite sex to beginning to imagine relationships with them; gay and lesbian youths start to grapple with their sexual orientation and adjust the ways they relate to same-sex peers. In early adolescence, most kids spend a lot of time fantasizing about romance and people they like, often without trying to start a relationship.

Crushes are one of the main ways younger adolescents connect to the opposite sex. They are more likely to have a crush on an acquaintance than a good friend of the opposite sex, and
far more likely to have a crush than a relationship. Early dates or relationships tend to be rare, awkward, and ephemeral. Girls at this point are in what researchers call the “initiation phase” of adolescent romantic relationships. Socially, they are figuring out how they might choose and relate to prospective partners by talking a lot about them with their friends. They ponder who likes whom and how they might go about getting a crush’s attention. Internally, the most detailed, vivid, and emotionally intense aspect of their nascent romantic lives is fantasy, not real interaction.

As kids move through their teens, their fantasies become more goal-oriented. A ninth-grader will probably spend more time
fantasizing about a crush than an eleventh-grader, and she’s more likely to keep her crush a secret. The eleventh-grader tends to see her crush as a precursor to a relationship. She’ll be more overt in letting her crush know how she feels. Once she realizes he’s not interested, she’s more likely to move on; if he is interested,
the crush may transition into a mutual relationship. This developmental pattern seems nicely utilitarian. In reality, it’s not nearly so neat. Crushes can get out of hand at any age. A girl who wants to make major life decisions to include a boy who doesn’t return her feelings, or a teen who cyberstalks a boy who has asked her to leave him alone, isn’t engaging in anything that will benefit her.

But in general, the landscape of a teen crush is a far safer and more beneficial one than the rough terrain of early relationships and sex, particularly for younger teens. Adolescents in relationships are particularly susceptible to one another’s influence. A teen partner can be a super-concentrated form of peer pressure, affecting delinquency rates, grades, and academic engagement. Though the partner’s impact can be positive—she’s inspired to work hard in school because he’s brainy, for example—it’s more likely that it won’t be. Romantic relationships in high school and early adolescence
are linked with lower grades and standardized test scores. Ninth-graders who date seriously or are sexually active are
much less likely than their peers to graduate from high school and enroll in college. Girls involved in romantic relationships have higher rates of depression than boys in relationships and peers of both sexes who don’t date at all. The more relationships that adolescents have, and the younger they are when they start them,
the greater the probability they will suffer from depression. The negative effects of early romantic involvement decrease as kids move into their late teens. Teen dating can also have positive impacts, giving teens great pleasure, emotional support, and useful experience in
handling intimacy and conflict. But
dating relationships are their single greatest source of stress.

Crushes, in contrast, provide a kind of emotional cocoon—a place to incubate intense emotion without the level of contact and influence entailed by a mutual relationship. Richard Weissbourd, a child and family psychologist at Harvard’s School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government, said that in middle school and high school, very few people are developmentally ready for the “real empathy, self-awareness, discipline, and courage” that it takes to have an intimate relationship. “Some middle school and high school students clearly have healthy romantic relationships, but a crush can be an important form of enacting something in fantasy as a way of preparing for something in reality,” he said.

His words made me think of Nikki. By her junior year at her large public high school in the South Bronx, it seemed like “everyone had a boyfriend” except her. She was an only child. Her mother, who worked in an administrative job for the city, raised Nikki largely by herself; her father had been estranged from the family for years. Her mother doggedly tried to ward off the dangers of the neighborhood, one of the most troubled areas of the country, where the poverty rate was the highest in the nation. The area was rife with drugs, gangs, and girls who became mothers before they finished high school.