Why Can't I Remember My Crush's Face?

For as long as I can remember I’ve had this weird cognitive glitch: whenever I’m developing a crush on someone, I find it nearly impossible to visualize their face. I try to will it to mind, but the image is blurry; I assemble it feature by feature, but the parts don’t add up to a whole. These failures are not just annoying, but unsettling, like trying to remember a dream, or dial a phone number from within one.

For years I thought it was just me. None of my friends ever reported the same thing, and it never came up in teen magazines. Rob, the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, lists it as one of the “textbook symptoms of a crush,” but the acknowledgment is so brief that when I read it in high school it almost confused me more. Crush-caliginosity, let’s call it — I don’t know if I like that, but I don’t have anything better right now — is a little like trypophobia: one of those odd conditions that lots of people share, but which rarely came up in conversation before the social internet. Today, dozens of posts on Quora and Reddit confirm that it’s common enough.

The matter of why it happens appears to be unresolved. It isn’t prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” in which one’s ability to recognize faces is impaired — generally, people who can’t remember their crush’s face can still recognize it on sight. It’s not aphantasia, a condition where one can’t conjure a mental image of anything. I can’t picture my crush, but I can picture a chihuahua or a red sedan.

Scrolling through online forums, you’ll find plenty of theories, some more authoritative than others: maybe the nervousness we feel around our crushes interferes with our ability to store visual information; maybe we’re seeing our crush’s “inner beauty” at the expense of their physical form. Or maybe what seems like a glitch is not really a glitch at all. I might be asking my brain to do something it just can’t do: pull together a coherent visual idea of someone I haven’t looked at very much, but think the world of, regardless.

People look different all the time. To get a good sense of someone’s face requires familiarity, which is exactly what crushes lack. The experience of crush-caliginosity — I think this is the last time I’ll be using that term — nicely captures the basic absurdity of crushing itself: devoting a huge amount of mental energy to very little mental material.

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Why do I need to “know” my crush’s face — at least, as a steady, unified concept? This seems like a rhetorical question, but it gets at the troubling equivalence we draw between faces and the people they belong to. In everyday life, faces are icons for individuals; we tend to assign them the status of something static and coherent, which they are everything but. In reality, a face functions more like an organ of one’s personality — doing the messy, vital work of expressing or suppressing thought and feeling. The fact that we tend to know each other by face is a frustrating, even cruel quirk of nature: a person’s face may be among their least consistent qualities, and their least characteristic.

Idiomatically, the face is a contradiction, associated with both intimacy and detachment. You meet someone face-to-face; you take them at face value. (The difficulty of facing someone is not so much having to look at them, but having to be looked at right back.) The writer Cat Zhang has observed that the face is both shorthand for intimacy and, on platforms like TikTok, pure commodity. Referring to the creator Bella Poarch, Zhang writes that “[her] goal, it seems, is to abstract her face into something as blank and universally appealing as the iconic yellow smiley.” This “emojification” — the advent of facial expressions as social currency — only underscores the fact that a face, anyone’s face, has a memetic life of its own.

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Sometime around 2010, waiting for the streetcar in Toronto, I noticed a low-fidelity flyer with an eye-catching headline: Ever Dream This Man? It featured a composite sketch of a face with dark eyes, a unibrow, and a receding hairline, explaining that strangers all over the world had reported seeing him in dreams. I visited the website at the bottom, which billed itself as a meeting spot for those who’d been “visited” and compiled firsthand accounts. Some described his presence as menacing, while others found it calming, even erotic; somehow every description made sense. There were flyers available for download in multiple languages, to print out and post yourself.

“This Man” turned out to be a hoax, perpetrated by an Italian “guerrilla marketer” named Andrea Natella. It may have been a promotional stunt for a horror film that never got made. Normally I resent campaigns of this nature, but here, I didn’t feel used; I felt like I’d been invited to join a pretty good game. Natella had designed a terrific creative prompt: the sort of face you might see on a subway car, stripped of all other identity markers. That was more than enough for observers to bring him to life.

I’m not bad with faces in general. On the contrary, I’m fairly good at remembering them; also, detecting resemblance, which is something I do habitually — I get really excited when I realize somebody looks like somebody else. Some of my friends dispute these comparisons, but I just don’t think they’re looking the right way. A pair of faces may not have features in common, but still share a compositional logic. It’s more like they analogize each other.

I’ll admit there are certain faces I “see” on a regular basis, and these may well be projections. You could say that these faces “haunt” me — a trope that I love in horror films, and in music videos — but these hauntings are not very dramatic. By and large, the faces belong to fondly remembered exes — people I care about, and would like to run into again — but not necessarily great loves. I see their likenesses all over the place, but I don’t necessarily feel their presence. I’m not sure if it’s the people I miss, or the faces themselves.

I don’t mean to understate the pleasures of admiring a face. These faces are attractive; typically, more attractive for being challenging, hard to resolve in a whole, and that’s probably why they come up again and again. The features are jagged from some angles, pretty from others. They achieve a pleasant harmony, then scatter in strange formations. The faces remind me of their owners, and I could draw some analogies between face and person. But I think it would be reductive to conflate them.

I have an uneasy relationship with my own face, as most of us do. Every such relationship is unique, and inextricable from those social categories that stack perception and shape one’s experience generally: race, gender, age, medical history. I tend to feel like my face requires context I’m rarely able to give; it feels at once like something I have little to do with, and something too personal to be sharing with strangers. A lot of people hated wearing covid masks, but I felt much more like myself with my face obscured; it removed a complication. After a while I stopped registering the difference between a masked and an unmasked face: my brain filled in the blanks, as with a jumbled word whose first and last letters are accurate. Whenever someone removed their mask, I was always a little jarred by the sudden disappearance of the face I had presumed.

To mangle Shakespeare, you can’t really see your own face, but everyone who looks at you can. Faces are independent that way: they live their own lives in other people’s impressions. I’m inclined to let my face be somebody else’s business. Having a face is a lot of responsibility; frankly, it’s exhausting. There’s a lot you can do to alter your face, to bring it more in line with who you are: you can lift, chisel, plump, soften, or paralyze. But in the end, your face will change itself, moment by moment, year by year. Your face is your lifelong avatar, and yet you might feel no affinity with it at all, no identification whatsoever. You have no idea what it’s doing most of the time. It startles you when you catch it in the mirror behind the bar.

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To test the theory I started this with — that my crushes are hard to visualize because I haven’t looked at them enough — I am trying to imagine the face of an occasional acquaintance, someone I’m perfectly neutral about. I’m not finding it difficult. Then again, the image in my head isn’t clear, exactly. It’s a basic resemblance, and because I don’t really care, that’s good enough.

The best response I saw on Quora — to the question of Why can’t I remember the face of the guy that I like? — came from someone named Xeno Rasmusson, a PhD in neuroscience, who pointed out that it’s equally hard to visualize people whose faces are very familiar. “Even now, with my wife of 15 years just behind me, it’s hard to render a clear & accurate image of her face in my mind’s eye. In my defense, in nearly 20 years, I’ve seen her face change over time but also make all sorts of emotional expressions in short order. Which version of her face would I try to imagine?”

I’m trying now to imagine my mother’s face, and I have to admit that it’s challenging. Every time I see her she looks different to me: new features have developed, old ones have emerged or submerged. I look at her differently depending on how we’re getting along, how she seems to be feeling, how I’m feeling about myself. To subsume all these faces into just one face would far exceed my powers of abstraction. It would almost feel violent.

There are people I miss a lot, but I rarely see them in a crowd. I tend to remember them by more peripheral prompts: scent, or gait, or body language — the way someone gestures while speaking, or holds their face at rest. The face itself is a blur, but the presence is strong.

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Crushing means becoming very intimate with a notion of a person; this intimacy is fed by the person’s remoteness. Trying, and failing to conjure their face means bumping up against this contradiction. The frustration is visceral: I'm caught in a loop of knowledge presumed and then thwarted. The face becomes a metonym for the very thing that eludes me: an adequate concept of who they are. The real presumption is that knowledge works this way to begin with — that the concept of a person is like the swirl inside a marble, a thing that can be gained and held onto.

In Autobiography of a Face, the poet Lucy Grealy, who had a portion of her jaw removed in childhood, describes a long series of reconstructive surgeries, spawning a cycle of hope and heartbreak. She imagines a future face that will represent her to the world, and bestow on her self-worth. In the end she releases this ideal, concluding: “I used to think that truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.”

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A note: recently, the magazine I worked for shuttered, which means I’ll be updating this newsletter more regularly. I’ll be writing long, I’ll be writing short. I’ll be doing combos. Thanks for reading.