No relationship is experienced in the same way by the people involved. We can’t know each other’s thoughts; we can’t hear each other’s hearts when they are beating fast. When we fall for someone, when the fact that they exist crushes us, we often don’t know anything about them, but we pretend that we can find out.
I was asked recently about the role that social media plays in our crushes, and what it was like before we had access to the faces, captions and tagged displays of the people we were crushing on. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and bought my first smartphone in 2009, when I was 25. I feel lucky, because my early crushes were entirely nebulous—there was no way to know anything beyond what I was shown in real life. The yearning was analogue.
