My Friend’s Obsessive Crush Is Driving Me Crazy!

Hey Dr. NerdLove,

So I am having problems with a friend. They are really close to me, almost like a brother. But lately they’ve been getting on my nerves as well as everyone else in the friend group. The thing is that he has a crush on one of our friends who doesn’t feel the same way but refuses to believe they don’t like him back because of the way they worded their text that they sent to tell him they don’t see him that way. It was fine for the first few months but it’s been getting worse.

At first it was just collecting photos of them on their phone. Then they made phone and watch wallpapers. They’ve even started wearing their crush’s favorite color and buying their crush’s cologne.

But since school got out they’ve gotten really “snippy” about anything. They snap at anyone and everyone and everyone is getting tired of it. At first we thought that it was because their sister-in-law was 9 months pregnant, even when she was overdue. But when it continued after the baby was born I told them that I know that their attitude wasn’t because of the baby. So they confessed to me it’s because they haven’t been able to hang around his crush at all since school let out. Everyone is tired of this attitude. I talked to another friend and said that their crush should tell my friend straight out that they don’t like them like that but my friend said that their crush tries to be too nice about it because they don’t want to be mean. What do I do?

Sincerely,

Over the Obsession

Inconvenient crushes are bad enough when either you’re the one with the crush or the one being crushed on. Those crushes become infinitely more frustrating when the person with the crush decides to go ahead and make it everyone’s problem.

Fortunately, this obsessive crush is the “makes someone really annoying to be around” kind, not the “I’m going to find you’ve been stealing their hair from the salon to make a shrine” kind. As frustrating as your friend is being, it’s the sort of behavior that’s mostly just embarrassing and cringe-y, and it can be important to keep that in perspective.

So what’s going on here is that your friend is dealing with what’s known as “limerence”. Limerence is a type of crush or infatuation that’s defined by its obsessive nature – there are frequent, even constant intrusive thoughts about the other person, the way that those feelings get in the way of their everyday life and responsibilities and how everything eventually gets brought back around to the sufferer’s feelings about the person they’re crushing on. Everything reminds them about their crush in some way, shape or form. The clouds look like their crush’s face, the scent on the wind smells like them, the song that came up on Spotify is all about them, etc. And it all comes down to the near-obsession with trying to get together with their crush. Which is actually part of the problem.

One of the hallmarks of limerence is the way it fucks with people’s emotional stability. The limerent’s mood seems to be almost entirely dependent on how things are going with their crush. If they feel that things are going well, they’re happy, even euphoric. When things are perceived as going badly, they become moody, depressed or even waspish, lashing out at the people around them in their frustration. The lows tend to come a lot faster and harder because, frankly, someone dealing with limerence is almost always dealing with a one-sided attraction; the person being crushed on often may be unaware or deliberately tries to avoid addressing the topic.

This is actually pretty common when both parties are young, especially when they both are in the same friend group. A lot of time, the person being crushed on often doesn’t want to say anything because of (understandable) fears that addressing the issue directly might cause tension among their friends. The problem, however, is that trying to ignore the problem or pretend it’s not happening doesn’t actually fix anything. And that’s part of why things have gotten so frustrating for you and your friends.

Here’s the thing with your obsessive friend: his crush isn’t doing anybody any favors by trying to be nice or being worried about being mean. The fact of the matter is that being “mean” in this case is actually going to be the kindest option possible. Trying to ignore his crush or soft-pedal any rejection is only going to make sure that he’s going to keep obsessing. If anything, the absence of a firm and direct “no, it’s never happening, please stop” is going to encourage him to keep holding on to his crush. Much like someone who thinks they’re stuck in “the Friend Zone”, they’re going to be looking for reasons why their case isn’t hopeless and all they have to do is hang on a little longer.

Limerence turns people into amateur oracles and haruspices, looking for signs in everything they see, no matter how obscure or absurd. They will dig deep into the guts of every glance, vocal intonation, precise word choice or song lyric in order to divine meaning, intent and – most of all – hope. If there is the slightest crumb of interest, an atom of change, then they will latch onto that like a lovesick lamprey and clamp down for all they’re worth, resisting reality’s attempts to dislodge them. It doesn’t matter how obvious the crush’s lack of interest may be in the macro; they’ll focus like a laser on the teeniest tiniest particle that they can interpret as telling them that they’re getting closer.

This also means that none of you all are going to be able to shake him out of this. It’s almost trivially easy to invent reasons why you’re all wrong about how his crush feels about him. It doesn’t matter how absurd the reasoning is, because this is not about reality, it’s about what he wants to believe. Motivated reasoning is a motherfucker, and your buddy has all the motivation in the world to interfere with his reasoning. As long as he can ignore the signs to the contrary, he can hold onto the dream that she’s eventually going to return his feelings.

So, as much as his crush may want to avoid the confrontation, she’s really the only person who can smack some sense into him. She’s going to have to tell him, straight up, in as simple and direct terms as possible that this is never going to happen. It needs to be simple and as straight forward as it can, with absolutely no softening of the blow. Any sort of verbal softener or qualifier is only going to be exploited like the devil revealing a loophole in a contract. This is why she needs to be blunt almost to the point of rudeness. Anything else will fit too easily into his desire to find wiggle room. If she says “I’m not interested in dating right now”, he’s going to focus on the “right now”. If she tells him “not in a million years”, he’s going to respond with “so you’re saying there’s a chance…”

Her telling him needs to be like a knife: short, sharp and strictly to the point. She doesn’t like him like that. She’s never liked him like that. She’s not going to like him like that. And if he doesn’t actually get over his crush on her, she’s not going to be able to be around him, be his friend or otherwise be part of his life. It’s going to be hard – nobody likes having to put things in such cold, blunt, binary terms, especially to a friend who’s only real offense is to be handling his feels poorly – but it’s necessary. Without the splash of ice-cold reality to the face, his limerence is going to linger until it fades on its own, which can take months or even years in some cases. And until it does, he’s going to continue making it everybody’s problem.

(Ask me how I know. Go on, ask…)

Now one thing to keep in mind is that while his crush needs to be cold and blunt in her refusal, that doesn’t mean that you all should be cold and blunt to him,especially afterwards. This refusal is going to hurt, a lot. Part of what’s going to help him recover from that pain, not to mention getting past it and to the point where it becomes a rueful, slightly embarrassing “God I was such a fucking dork” memory, is going to be the love of his friends. You all don’t need to reassure him that there’ll be someone else eventually or any of the usual post-rejection/post-break-up cliches, just reminders that he’s loved and cared for. That means not saying “we told you so” or getting on his case for being so annoying about his crush. It’ll be a lot better to say “Yeah, we agree, it absolutely sucks that someone doesn’t love you the way you wish they did. But you are loved, you are loveable and as much as it feels like this is going to hurt forever, we promise you that this is going to pass.”

He’s going to have a sad about it. Let him; this stage is rough, but it’s the emotional equivalent of hydrogen peroxide on a cut. This is ultimately about the pain of letting go of an impossible dream and realizing how much time you’ve lost chasing it. As he lets things go, he’ll reach acceptance that much sooner and hit the stage of being a little sad but also a little wiser and he can start to forgive himself for loving not wisely but too well. And with a little luck and newfound maturity, he and his (soon to be former) crush can go back to being friends and this will be an incident that you all will laugh fondly about in the future.

Good luck.

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Hi Doc,

I’m just gonna get right into it. My most recent ex and I broke up in October 2021. I’ve experienced a fling or two since then but nothing worthwhile. I’ve done some reflection as to why my love life is so bone dry and I think part of the problem may be flirting, in that I don’t.

In my late teens and early 20s, I used to be a very flirtatious person. But the reason I don’t really flirt anymore is because, in a world that is post-#MeToo and Time’s Up and all these very necessary movements, I dread making people feel uncomfortable or, god forbid, unsafe around me. I guess my problem is that I don’t know where the line is. I don’t know when harmless flirting becomes harassment. And like I said, I never wanna be someone people feel like they should be on high alert around.

Maybe your advice can help me break out of this mindset.

Sincerely,

Not a Creep, Just a Weirdo

It’s good to be mindful of not wanting to make people uncomfortable or not wanting to cause people to feel unsafe. But the problem here is that you’ve taken it to an extreme, and to a point where you’ve basically made paralysis the seemingly only available choice.

This is something that comes up a lot, NACJAW. Like, a lot a lot, especially around here, and honestly… it kind of betrays how much the discourse around #MeToo and the rest has ended up giving folks the wrong impression. Not the movement itself, not the examination of behavior that it inspired, the discourse about it.

The biggest misunderstanding I’ve found that well-meaning people have is that #MeToo wasn’t about awkward dudes not knowing where the line is or someone getting upset because a guy she didn’t think was attractive asked her on a date. It was about the number of out and out predators and harassers who had been getting by without consequence. The idea that “#MeToo ruined dating and flirting” was very much a reaction to the movement – an attempt to minimize people’s very real, very understandable frustration by framing it as being too much or women being “unreasonable”.

It’s very much of a piece of when people complained that sexual harassment – especially in the wake of the Clarence Thomas hearings – were women “overreacting” or that they were too “sensitive” and this was making dating or working with women too hard because reasons. The attempts to dismiss or diminish what it was actually about began almost immediately. Some of this was, admittedly, deliberate on the part of shitty people who latched onto #MeToo as the latest arm of the ongoing culture war, some of it was the result of algorithmic trends encouraging increasing vitriol in the discussions online, but some of it is because people didn’t (and in some cases, still haven’t) actually paid attention to what the actual problems were and let the conservative culture warriors dictate terms of the conversation.

The perpetrators who were the spark that kicked off the #MeToo movement weren’t folks making awkward passes or asking someone out to dinner one too many times. They weren’t simple misunderstandings or misinterpretations that people might make in good faith. They were serial harassers and predators. People like Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein were rapists who preyed on women in their orbit – using their influence and clout to lure in their targets while using their power in the industry to ensure silence and avoiding accountability for their actions.

(If you want to have a better understanding of why it all boiled over when it did, I would recommend checking out Maureen Ryan’s excellent book “Burn It Down”, which talks about the toxic culture behind the scenes in Hollywood).

Other folks like Louis CK and Vic Mignogna weren’t well-meaning but clueless bumblers, they engaged in consistent patterns of sexually aggressive behavior – behavior that was clearly unacceptable – with many many people. They, too, were insulated from consequences by their status and by people who didn’t take it seriously. The point of #MeToo was to bring to people’s attention just how wide spread this behavior was, how many people had experienced it and how it was at the very least tacitly accepted if not approved of by many. It’s not like there was a blurry line that got crossed when Louis CK would just drop trou and start jerking it in front of female comedians after all.

So right from the jump, you should understand that the bar you’re being expected to clear is very, very low. Low bars can be tripped over, sure, and people can still fuck up, but the thing that’s making you afraid was the result of the behavior of predators, not people making honest mistakes. The line is fairly simple: the difference between flirting and harassment is that harassment is unwanted and persistent. If you ask someone out on a date or flirt a little and they say “no thank you” or otherwise show they’re not interested and you stop? Not harassment. If you keep hitting on them every time you see them, argue their lack of interest or otherwise make it more about your desire for them rather than their desire to be left alone, especially when its making them uncomfortable? Harassment. The discomfort is an especially big part of what makes the difference, particularly when the discomfort is ignored or dismissed.

The next thing to realize is flirting isn’t inherently harmful, unwelcome or otherwise makes people uncomfortable. What is harmful and unwelcome are folks who a) don’t bother to read the room, b) aren’t mindful of other people’s comfort and interest and c) don’t take “no, thank you” for an answer. If you can pay attention to how someone’s feeling and can hear “no” or “I’d prefer if you didn’t” and respect their no without making it a problem? You’re going to be ok.

Now that having been said, there’re some things you can do that will help make sure that you’re able to go out and meet, mingle and flirt without making things awkward or uncomfortable.

To start with, you want to flirt with people who want to flirt with you. Of course, finding out who does want to flirt can feel like a bit of a challenge. However, people don’t expect you to be mind-readers; they just expect you to be able to read the moment. One of the easiest ways to gauge someone’s interest is simply to use a low-level flirt like a ping on the sonar – and one ping only, Mr. Vassily. You make a small, non-sexual compliment, you make a mild tease, whatever works with your flirting style – and see what comes back. Do they respond in kind? Do they match your energy or even escalate it? Great! They want to flirt with you. Do they seem to miss the flirting or just not respond? OK, they probably aren’t interested in flirting.

You can use the ping as a way of gauging levels of interest as well. If someone is meeting your energy but only to a certain point – you make a more overtly ribald comment or a more direct expression of interest and they don’t match it – then you know where the upper limits are and you can stay there. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t like you or aren’t interested, but not everyone needs or wants to go full Pepe Le Pew or the fruit scene from Tom Jones.

Another way to help make sure people feel comfortable – and to ensure that you know if you and they are on the same page – is to use your words. Even something simple as a “may I…?” before taking their hand to lead them to another part of the room or touching them on the arm or back or what-have-you makes a big, welcome difference.

Sure, sometimes it can feel awkward, especially when you’re getting used to incorporating asking directly into your flirtatious lexicon, but that’s the awkwardness of inexperience and unfamiliarity, not anything inherent to asking. For all the jokes and shit-talking people do about asking for a kiss or saying “is it ok if I…” or “would you like me to…”, it’s far less awkward to tell someone that you want to kiss them (and give them room to say “yes” or “no”) than to go for a kiss and get the cheek or even a “wait what’re you doing?” Done well, asking for consent during flirting – “I’m trying so hard not to kiss you right now…” – can be sexy as hell.

Another thing you can do to make sure that people feel more secure about you is almost absurdly simple: you make it clear to them that it’s ok to say no. Literally saying “hey, it’s totally ok to tell me you’re not interested” or “I’m safe to reject” can make a huge difference. Acknowledging the unspoken but understood worry that women have about a guy, making it overt and saying “I get this, it’s fine, let me address it now” is a very small thing, but it sends the message that you’re aware, that you’re mindful of how people feel and that you want to make sure this is something you’re both into. A reel from Instagram user dinosaur.arms has a great example of this dynamic in action.

And the last thing you can do that will make the difference is equally simple: if you make a mistake or misread things, you apologize. People know mistakes happen, signals can be misread and sometimes folks just miss things. Recognizing when it happens, apologizing for it and stopping the unwanted behavior is part of what makes it clear that this really was just a mistake. A sincere, simple apology – “oh, I got that wrong, I’m sorry” – is all that’s needed 90% of the time. You’re acknowledging that you made a mistake, you recognize it and you’re taking responsibility by apologizing and then letting the matter drop.

Like I said: it’s good to be mindful about people’s comfort and safety, and it’s good to want to make sure that the folks you want to flirt with want to beflirted with. Just don’t over-correct so hard that you end up afraid to do anything. Nobody’s asking for that, nobody’s expecting it. All anyone expects is for you to pay attention, learn and to do your best.

Good luck.

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This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.

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