Lets talk about crushes.

I am renowned for developing crushes pretty rapidly and getting let down just as quick, so I’m no stranger for the crushing feeling that having a crush can bring.  I wanted to share my “first crush” story with you, for what reason?  I’m not sure.

Now I have to be honest..High School was never very kind to me. I was your everyday teenage girl… except I was a swot, had freckles, and ginger hair. Alone, these 3 attributes are kind of scary, together I was lucky to not have my head flushed down a toilet on a daily basis. I was pretty much Josie Grosie.

I’m lucky I survived high school to be fair. Which is why this story is not really surprising.

As for crushes, aside from an array of celeb crushes (Mark Owen, Ben from A1, Lee Brennan from 911, Michael Owen..  need I continue?) the selection of boys in my year at high school, and even in the years above me was quite frankly… pitiful.

“Him”, he was every single thing that I wasn’t.  Athletic, popular, funny… okay, he was fucking gorgeous and about a million miles out my league.

I was unashamedly, and ridiculously smitten… I’m talking looking at the ground, tugging at my clothes, playing my hair and turning a brighter shade of red every single time he was in a 10metre vicinity of me.  As for talking to him, any attempt at conversation was basically “Hi…jkghdgdgwudhuqwd.” Safe to say that I turned into the epitome of a dork and made a complete embarrassment of myself at every given opportunity.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only female who had noticed the fresh meat walking the corridors.  When I say that most girls fancied him, its probably an understatement.  When I spoke to a girl I went to school with about an upcoming school reunion, HE came up in conversation and she concluded: “I think every single girl wanted a piece of him” – I told you so.  He’d walk through the corridors and you could almost hear the sound of girls swooning as a puddle of saliva formed at their feet. You know that scene in Twilight where Edward Cullen walks into the cafeteria, time kind of slows down and
everyone stares at him. Yep. That was “him”.

Unsurprisingly enough, despite my “best attempts” to not to be the biggest dork to ever walk the planet in front of him, my crush never became anything more than a crush because of every girl that seemed infinitely less dorky/uninteresting/completely idiotic than I was.

After High School I saw him a number of times after & he looked the same, if not better than he did at 15.  On every single occasion bar one, I turned into that 14 year old mess again and refused to speak to him (in fact, on one occasion I got on the wrong bus just so I wouldn’t have to stand at the bus stop with him). On the one occasion that I didn’t turn into a hot mess was the occasion when (as the writer of Fifty Shades of Grey would say…) I discovered my inner goddess.  I was on the worst date of my life, he was in the same bar  as I made a desperate run to the ladies room to powder my nose/text someone to ask them to ring me in half an hour and say that something bad happened so I could hot foot it out of that date, he stopped me.  And then it happened.  Him, he, the subject of all my exercise book doodles asked me for my number – this was after he told me how good I was looking and he hugged me.  Hugged. Me.

I did the Snoopy dance #justsaying

This was not a “aw, as if she ended up falling in love with the boy she had a crush on back in school after he came to his senses and realised how awesome she was”, no siree. Fast forward some exchanges of text messages where he apologised for being such a knob the whole time we were at school… and then I got rejected on the most spectacular level.  5 years later and thanks to the power of Facebook I found out that he’d grown up, gotten even more ruggedly handsome and gotten married. (Facebook: creating stalkers and breaking hearts since Mark Zuckerburg got his heart broken)

It was then that I swore to high heaven that he is, always was and always would be one of “those guys”, the type that girls develop crushes on that you should stay away from for your own sanity/self esteem.  We all have them, we will fall them time and time again throughout our lifetime, we won’t be the first girl to fall for them and have to dust our knees off and we certainly won’t be the last.  They’re like kryptonite for crush developing girls like myself.

There’s a reason why crushes are called crushes, after all.