Introducing: Crush Material
This is a series about crushes, and the question of how best to love people we don’t really know. Here I’ll be talking about attractions: to celebrities, public figures, characters from fiction, and sometimes private individuals, if it’s interesting and doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy. By “crush,” I mean any passionate, fixed attachment — often romantic, but not necessarily — sustained, and fed, by a measure of distance. Crushing is a process where a person comes to stand for something otherwise inarticulable: an emotion, an imagined other life, an identity. (To quote Wayne Koestenbaum, writing on Jackie O: “an instrument of longings we can’t name.”)
The crushing I’m talking about includes the relationship of biographers to their subjects, actors to their characters. I have three main interests here: my crushes, other people’s crushes, and crushing in general — as a practice and a pastime; the ethics, the impact, and the history of its theorization, from Stendhal to Barthes to Dorothy Tennov, the psychologist who coined the term “limerence” in the 1970s. (I am not an academic, mind you, just an experienced crusher who has written a lot on these themes. I am a dilettante and happy to be one.) Sometimes I’ll be talking about individuals, sometimes the cult of an individual, sometimes an alluring characteristic.
There’s another way to describe this mode of infatuation, not exactly synonymous, but overlapping: “parasocial relationship,” a term coined in the 1950s that has become broadly useful as one-sided attachments have grown more intricate and more commonplace. It used to be somewhat provocative, at least in certain contexts, to admit you preferred the artist to the art, or that people might be inherently interesting without “making” anything. That stance is intuitive now. Creative people, with the help of new media, have long since figured out how to extract the quality of personhood that would otherwise enchant a body of work, or simply bottle the pleasure of considering someone else.
The clinicality of “parasocial relationship,” at least to my ears, positions the speaker as an observer; to use the term “crush” is to be invested in crushing. It also suggests a social phenomenon, something particular to an epoch, but crushing is rudimentary. So, I prefer “crush.” It feels more natural — many of us have known what to call a crush for nearly as long as we’ve been having them — and more versatile: a crush is a crush, but so’s a celebrity crush, a friend crush. You could develop a crush on a long-term partner, depending on the nature of your relationship. (Tiana Reid, writing in The New Inquiry: “These pluralized crush possibilities — one for every occasion! — in fact underscore the promise of crushing’s structure of feeling, its unfinished emergence.”)
So many social phenomena associated with digital media seem, to me, like slick realizations of once ineffable emotional ideas — ones that long predate the consumer internet, but were never popularly named in English. (When I hear the term “vibe,” I think of the ephemeral, immersive feeling I’ve always gotten from peering into lit windows at night.) This is both exciting and unsettling: these inchoate forms and feelings are now discussable, workwithable; they now have labels that come in handy, even as they are programmed and monetized and discussed by people I find annoying. This newsletter is in favor of new ways of thinking about old things, but also of remystification, of finding the intimate throughlines from one era to the next. Crushing is one way that happens.
In talking about my own crushes, I’m trying to articulate these attractions in such a way that they might potentially become yours. Something of central interest here is the basic ethical question of how we could square our fixed ideas of people with a respect for their separateness and autonomy. One answer: attempt to mine something worthwhile from the fixation itself, a third-party entity that does not need to pin itself on the unknowable subject. A collaboration in absentia.
My main objective is not to bore you, or myself.