Yes, I have a few girl crushes, and I also keep a list of “girls I’d go lesbo for.” Don’t we all?
Check out some of the reasons women develop girl crushes:
- "I stammer around her, and it's definitely because I think she's supercool."
- "She really knows her stuff, and there's something almost sexy about that."
WAY different than boy crushes, for sure.
A crush is a relatively mild form of infatuation. People have killed themselves over true love, said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who has written extensively on human love. Think of Romeo and Juliet. With a girl crush, Dr. Fisher said, "you won't kill yourself if she doesn't want to jump rope with you." For that reason, girl crushes can give women safe and valuable experience in the emotions of love.
Dr. Fisher, the author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love," said girl crushes are as natural as any other kind of love. But they are romantic without being sexual. Love and lust are distinct urges, Dr. Fisher said.
This was one of the findings she and colleagues from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the State University at Stony Brook made when they analyzed brain scans of people 18- to 26-years-old who were experiencing new love. Love and lust, it turned out, could be mapped to several separate parts of the brain.
"The brain system for romantic love is associated with intense energy, focused energy, obsessive things - a host of characteristics that you can feel not just toward a mating sweetheart," Dr. Fisher said, adding that "there's every reason to think that girls can fall in love with other girls without feeling sexual towards them, without the intention to marry them."
Do guys ever develop boy crushes? Do they admit to them?
(Shout out to my friend Amanda for the link.)
Posts
4 comments:
Yes to the first.
Absolutely No to the second.
But I'm an oddball and I admit that the possibility for me exists. As the cliche goes, I'm secure enough in my masculinity blah blah blah...
But I've thought long and hard about the kind of guy I could fall for, which is distinct from my ideal girl. But if I were to meet such a guy, it would immediately turn sexual because I'm a very sexual person.
Honestly, I've had a few guy crushes in my life, too.
Not that I'm gay or anything.
Ohh, Carol Channing is coming back to Broadway this Fall!
Like I said...
Ah, this explains why married women started finding me attractive at some point. I kept wondering if I was putting out some kind of mixed signal, or dressed in some secret-lesbian way. They just admire me. Gotcha.
Hee.
I guess you're not so far behind the times; that article just showed up in my local paper (a NYTimes-owned newspaper) today. Some might say you're ahead of the curve.
Post a Comment