Description

Introduction 💌

When you find out your crush doesn’t like you back, it’s a dagger to the heart. It’s a stab to the ego. But when you hear they like someone else in your friend group instead, it’s a double blow. The tsunami that follows the earthquake. For example, last week, I found out that the guy I sent a fun love letter to actually fancies my friend, and now they’re dating. Meanwhile, I’m still single and have been left to wallow in one of the saddest facts of life: not everyone that we find attractive will like us back.

But from asking around, the one reassuring thing I’ve discovered is that I’m not alone. It turns out crushes and friend groups are risky business. One girl told me she introduced her female friend to her close family guy friend at a wedding; he also happened to be her childhood crush, who had always been out of reach. Before she knew it, her friend was making out with him, and they dated for over a year. Boo! That’s gotta sting. Another girl’s best friend and her crush got together. But then she witnessed their six-month relationship turn toxic before it finally ended.

This is real life, people! Just to be clear, I’m not into love-letter man anymore, and in this article, I’m going to share all my practical tips on how you can wipe away all your feelings of unrequited love as well. So, how are we going to kill your crush? Here are my thoughts on how to help you through this.

1. Feel the pain 😫

There’s no way around it. Depending on how long you’ve been attached to your crush, this may warrant a full-blown ugly-cry. Unless, of course, you’re currently at a wedding like my friend was, watching this play out in front of your very eyes. In that case, you have to hang in there and distract the heck out of yourself until it’s safe for you to ugly-cry later.

Feel free to excuse yourself, politely decline invitations, and get some space. Leave town if you need to. Tell your friend group you’re grateful for the party invite, but you can’t go. You’re busy! Do what you need to do to feel the sadness and rage and not hang out with the new happy couple together. I escaped to the woods for two days on my own, with no electricity or internet. I also sat in my house, blasted rock music while doing a jigsaw puzzle, and let the rage burn through my body. Both of these activities were therapeutic in their own ways.

So, I encourage you to go to a museum. Get lunch with your grandma. Work on that poem you started writing a couple of weeks ago. Do whatever activities it takes to remind yourself that your crush person’s opinion of you has no reflection on your self-worth. Instead, your self-worth comes from how you show up in the world in your own beautiful way. Take time away from everyone and do things that make you feel joyful, valued, and alive.

2. Accept your humanness 🧘‍♀️

You are not a perfect person, but then again, no one else is either. There is a really cheesy line from an outdated breakup book that says, “Even Halle Berry has been dumped” (Greg Behrendt, page 113). It’s true. No one is safe from rejection in the world of romance.

However, self-compassion expert Dr. Kristin Neff has a useful approach to this. In her incredible TED Talk, she talks about the importance of “common humanity.” I’m paraphrasing, but she says that suffering is a part of life. Everyone suffers. We are not alone in our suffering, and that’s precisely what connects us to other people. Accepting this can help us feel connected to others rather than excluded. So, yes, I was comforted by the stories of my friend’s similar experiences. And frankly, it helped me to know that some of them had it even worse than me.

3. Limit your contact with your crush 🫣

This is going to be hard. It’s time for you to accept the time you have wasted on your crush as a sunk cost and walk away. Just like after a breakup, I recommend a good 60 days of no contact.

You have a limited but beautiful amount of energy in your life. Chances are you've been channeling at least part of your energy into your crush person, who isn’t appreciating it. This is your time to redirect your energy towards better things. This could mean working harder, studying a new topic, exploring a new part of the city, and finally signing up for that half marathon that you wanted to do (don't look at me; that was your idea).

Ultimately, the decision to walk away from a crush is about you and how you want to treat yourself differently. You can't get your time back. You can't get your dignity back, either. But you do have agency. It’s your responsibility to prioritize what’s healthiest for you and do something about it. This probably means not doing anything because it means not calling your crush and not putting yourself in the unnecessarily painful situation of hanging out with the new happy couple. This is an opportunity for you to grow because it was never about the other person. They were never involved with you in the way you wanted them to be.

4. Unbury the red flags 🚩

It’s time to resurrect all the warnings you had about your crush. You know, the things that you first noticed were wrong with them but that you strategically forgot about?

Make a list of all this person’s red flags and all the reasons why they were wrong for you to begin with. I’ll start: you only want to get involved romantically with people who want to get romantically involved with you, so your unrequited crush doesn’t qualify!

Red flags can be anything. Were they addicted to weed, alcohol, shitty club nights, or video games? Did they take advantage of you? Were they your boss who always asked you to do extra work but didn’t pay you for it, but you did it anyway because you were in love with him? (Guilty). Did they specifically tell you that they have never had a girlfriend that they haven’t cheated on? (Okay, fine, guilty again).

If you start to feel angry towards them, good! That means it’s working. You’re no longer willing to put up with their shittiest qualities. Which means you’re one giant step further away from being smitten by them.

5. Face what you’re avoiding 🙃

Do you find yourself falling in love with people who live 5,000 miles away, who you’ve never met in person? If so, you might be using unreachable crushes as a distraction from forming real intimate relationships. (Guilty, again, okay? Stop looking at me like that!)

My friend sent me a beautiful Instagram post called “Why We Fall in Love with Unavailable People” from The School of Life. My favorite part of it says,

“People stuck in these unrequited situations may garner a lot of sympathy. But in truth, they may have actively sought out such situations as a way of avoiding the trials of true intimacy. Actual, committed relationships are frequently mundane, messy, and often ‘unromantic.’ It may be far easier and safer to indulge in a fantasy that has no chance of being realized.”

I have wasted years on crushes I have never met, teetering on levels that probably make me a candidate for SLAA (Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous). These days, I’m trying to get brutally honest about one-way love sooner. And that’s sad. In reality, it's not the darkest before the dawn. It's darkest at midnight when you have nothing to save you, and you’re not sure if you’re going to be okay. That’s what getting rid of my crushes and fantasies feels like. But as hard as it is, I know that it’s healthier for me to free myself from my fantasies sooner because then I’ll be more emotionally and energetically available to welcome someone real into my life.

6. Don’t read too much into it 📚

I originally wrote a long section in this article where I related this experience to feelings of abandonment in my childhood. When I mentioned this to my therapist on Thursday, she said to me,

“I wouldn’t extrapolate this experience so much. Sometimes, these things just happen.”

At some level, I was enjoying the pain of relating my rejection to the deepest, darkest wounds of my childhood. But I think my therapist has a point. You’re not unlovable. This is just a bump in the road. And you’re going to get back to your life, figure your s**t out, and find someone else.

7. Maybe you should talk to someone; if not, AI 🤖

It’s natural to question who you can really trust when something like this happens in your friend group. Your friendships and the people you can confide in may well shift because of it.

When this happened to me, I wanted to open up to people, but I didn’t want to stir s**t and make my friends take a side. A couple of months before, one of my friends introduced me to Claude, an AI chatbot by Anthropic. So, instead of talking to a real person, I started talking to Claude. To be honest, it's felt good to share things with the AI that I couldn’t share with my friends. Trauma dumping on an AI (for now) seems to be a great way for me to process and sort through my feelings. I prefer Claude's interface because it has a cute orange bauble as its logo, and I find the interface to be more warm and friendly than ChatGPT. Plus, ChatGPT used to give me answers that were too long and felt overwhelming. Get Claude! I encourage you to give her a whirl.

8. Start caring less ✨ 🤸

I feel annoyed to be writing this, but people often give me the b******t advice of,

“You’ll fall in love when you least expect it.”

I understand what they mean now. Over the last few years, I’ve matched with hundreds of men on every dating app imaginable, scouring every algorithm for a crumb of mutual interest. When I do finally meet someone I think is attractive, I care what this guy thinks of me. I want him to like me! And that makes me anxious and nervous around him. I’m not being myself.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that my carefree friends, the ones who don’t even want to be in a relationship, are constantly inundated with new lovers. Because they don’t care, they are free to be their natural, fun, awesome selves. Who do you think the guy is going to go for? Her, obviously. It’s unfair, but it’s the truth. It pains me to admit it, but I’m starting to believe that if I cared less about dating and finding someone to love, it might actually happen for me. Not only that, but I’d probably feel happier and more fulfilled with my current life, which I believe is awesome.

It’s a useless and impractical thing to say, but I think us romantic hopefuls have to stop caring so much. When we don’t care about the outcome of a conversation, we’re free to be ourselves, and that’s the more attractive version of us anyway. Annoying, but it’s true. And this is something I have to work on. I’m trying not to evaluate whoever I’m talking to as a potential mate, and instead, I’m practicing forming meaningful, genuine connections and not being worried about the outcome.

9. Remember who you are and what you want 🚀

If you’ve just been rejected, and you’re experiencing some level of public humiliation, it’s time to ground yourself in your own goals again. For example, my most recent experience of getting rejected reminded me that I don’t want to be married; I want to have two children, and I truly enjoy being single. I probably just wanted to use that guy for the stroking of my ego and the sex anyway.

So, go back to your vision board or write down some of your personal goals using your logical adult brain. Are you on track to be promoted at work? Do you want to build your side hustle? Are you planning a trip to Paris with your girlfriends this summer? Your logical adult brain knows that it’s completely fine that your crush isn’t interested in you. Because you’ve got a bunch of cool s**t going for you, you don’t have time to think about someone who’s not helping you get to where you want to go.

10. Use your rage as fuel ⛽️

I believe that it’s good for women to feel angry. It’s very taboo in our culture for women to be filled with rage, and yet rage is our helpful warning sign that something is wrong. Someone crossed your boundary. Someone did you dirty. And you need to stand up for yourself. Are you going to sit back and take it? F**k no!

I’ve found that rage and humiliation can be the best kind of fuel. Do you have a creative project you’re working on that you can’t seem to finish? The sting of a public rejection from your crush will get you over that final hurdle. Alchemize your pain into art. Of course, that’s what I’m doing right here with this article. But it’s true! Now, go make some kick-ass art!

Conclusion 💸

Not even the most shamelessly sexy among us can go through life without the occasional battering of the ego. But while you can’t control whether your crush likes you back or whether they end up dating your friend, you do have agency over how you handle it. Hopefully, something in this piece resonated with you, whether it’s getting the f**k out of town for a minute or alchemizing the pain of your heartbreak into art if not just being a happy and carefree person who doesn’t give a s**t about what other people think.

Lastly, I want to leave you with the words of Jackson Browne, arguably one of the greatest songwriters of all time. He shared this at the beginning of a live performance of his song, “Fountain of Sorrow,”

“This is a song about someone that I used to go out with a long time ago. And we broke, and then I didn’t see her for a while. And then I saw her again after a long absence, and she was really amazing, really beautiful. You know you remember all the good stuff. All the bad stuff is set at home. So I wrote her this song. But as time went on, as the years went on, it turned out to be quite a bit more generous a song than she deserved.” (Jackson Browne)

There you have it. I do not doubt that, like Jackson Browne, if you alchemize your feelings towards your crush into art, in the due course you’ll realize that all the energy you afforded your crush will turn out to be more generous than they deserved. So, go forth. Multiply! I believe in you!

Love,

Tash

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