Love is like a fever, which comes and goes quite independently of the will. Most of us tend to flatter ourselves that we are somewhat rational people. We take account of the evidence, form opinions based on sound reasoning, and come to careful conclusions that stand up to stringent scrutiny. However, there is one situation which will turn even the most reasonable of us into chaotic, over-anxious messes. And what is more, this is not an intense trauma or a horrible misfortune.
but instead a perfectly normal event, having a crush. Especially prevalent amongst young people, a crush is one of the most philosophically interesting mental states. A peculiar mix of love, lust, and limerence, most of us have had them, and most of us have done incredibly embarrassing things in their service.
And yet, at the same time, we rarely investigate why crushes can have such a hold of us, why they can make us behave so irrationally, and, most importantly, why they hurt. And this unique mix of passion and pain was investigated with intense verve by Stendhal in his work On Love. So we will be drawing on his thoughts, as well as many others, to put together a loose philosophy of the crush. Get ready to learn the egoistic side of romance, how you can fall in love with an imaginative image, and why losing a crush is both freeing and deeply unsettling. Now, this is a pretty personal topic, so if you do not relate to these observations, then that is absolutely fine.
As with almost all of my videos, I largely intend this to be a springboard for your own thinking. So, let's begin by looking at the primary method by which Stendhal thinks we develop a crush, and how it is intimately related to the imagination. 1. Crystallization and Fantasy One of the fascinating things about us humans is we are truly amazing at fantasizing. From a very young age, we can engage in imaginative play.
where we construct these little worlds, either alone or with friends, for us to enjoy and explore. Some biologists have argued that the imagination is a phenomenal tool for survival. It allows us to picture the possible outcomes of a whole range of situations and thus plan a course of action in an awful lot of detail. Far more so than if we did not have the ability to fantasize or imagine. Separate from any evolutionary advantage, this has also allowed us to craft great works of literature, philosophy, and art.
Also, According to Stendhal, it is a vital component in the early stages of passionate love. The key idea that forms the basis of Stendhal's analysis of falling in love is crystallization. He uses this term pretty broadly, but essentially it is the process by which we slowly idolize someone until we are completely infatuated with them.
Even in cases where we may not have that much reason to be. Take Shakespeare's Othello, for example. In the opening act, Othello articulates how he won Desdemona's heart, and she very much agrees with his account.
The general would regale her with tales of his adventures, how he had gone into mortal danger and seen all of these wonderful things. He told her of his feelings and his memories, and all of this gave her a picture of Othello as the dashing hero he was. At this point, Desdemona's imagination took over, although Othello undoubtedly seemed...
brave and kind, at the same time she was seduced by the stories he told her and how she carried these away with her mind. She crystallized an idea of Othello that was far beyond what she had directly experienced or had evidence existed. And this cemented her passion for him, to the point where she would willingly follow him to war.
The poet John Keats wittily summed up this idea when he accused young people of turning their lover's hair comb into a tiara and their wellingtons into Romeo's boots. The structure here is pretty straightforward. We meet someone, learn a few things about them, and then we extrapolate a whole host of other qualities from that which may or may not be true, but that do serve to heighten the object of our affections. Stendhal thinks this is a major component of the early stages of love, and it also goes some way to explaining how our rationality can become hijacked when we meet someone we find attractive.
Through this crystallization process, we start to exaggerate their positive qualities until they almost become a sort of caricature of themselves if we take it too far. In some ways, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Hell, sometimes our crystallizations will even give us an accurate picture of our beloved if it just so happens that they really are that exceptional.
But at the same time, Stendhal points out that this process is, in a real sense, detached from the object of our affections as they actually exist. It could be that our imaginative guesses are correct, but it could also be that we are filling in the gaps of our knowledge with whatever brilliant qualities we can think of, and that as a result we are more in love with the idea of someone than with the person themselves. We can think of this a little bit like picking possibilities.
The less you know about someone, the more potential positive attributes they could have. Until you've had an extended conversation with someone, for all you know, they could be clever and charming. Until you have slept with them, they might be the best person in the world in bed.
Until you have seen someone in an extremely stressful situation, then you can believe that they are impossibly strong, calm, and wise. As Boethius once said, if someone keeps their mouth shut, we might think them a philosopher. Crushes are excellent for this because most of the time these are people we have not experienced in a romantic context. Even if you've had a crush on a close friend, you do not know what they would be like in a relationship with you, so it is easy to imagine that you would be perfect for one another.
Then, this fantastical image can roam freely in your head, leaving the real situation firmly in the dust. In some ways, this is what distinguishes a crush from simply the first stages of a relationship. A crush is merely a possible relationship before it becomes actual. The stereotypical settings for crushes also maintain a perfect balance between familiarity and distance.
People tend to get crushes on someone they work with or someone from their school or university. Either way, you see them very often, but not often enough that they are not still full of mystery. For some people, they might only need a little mystery.
For others, it might be quite a lot. But the point is, there is enough distance for the imagination to worm its way in and start its crystallizing magic. And...
of course, if you're genuinely convinced that the possibility of being with the perfect person is on the table, then it makes sense for it to occupy a large portion of your mind. If an all-knowing God showed up on your doorstep tomorrow, introduced you to someone, and told you that this person would make you happy for the rest of your life, then your other priorities would understandably slip down the hierarchy. For Stendhal, so powerfully does our imagination work that we start to believe that our crystallized lover genuinely exists. and then our psyche understandably dwells on them, sometimes to the point of obsession.
Sadly, this can also lead to severe disappointment should the idealized image be suddenly shattered. Stendhal thinks that this can get really quite extreme. In a particularly romantic mood, almost everything might remind you of your beloved, from seeing a certain book that you think they might enjoy, to watching something, only to imagine how much better it would be if they were there.
Once you are in the realm of fantasy, the possibilities are endless, and you can turn everything and its opposite towards your growing romantic endeavor. Of course, not everyone will get this feeling to the same extent. I think as we get older, we become more used to keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground when it comes to crystallization.
But I do still think Stendhal is really onto something here. It is an observation that has been made by numerous other thinkers as well. From the lovers idealizing one another in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, to the idolization of Juliet as the son by the young Romeo, the infatuation of passion has formed the basis for so much effective comedy and tragedy because we often recognize it in the behaviors of the people around us and in ourselves. But that may explain the strength of feeling that can occur with a crush. What about the sort of agony it can become?
Funnily enough, here Stendhal taps into a common theme amongst thinkers about love, and explores the tension between two familiar romantic qualities. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing to my Patreon for exclusive content. The link is in the description. 2. Love's labours lost and won In almost every romance story, the tension is whether or not the lovers will end up together. From Romeo and Juliet to Twilight, for the majority of the plot, the protagonists are kept in a dance of never quite living happily ever after, while being tantalizingly close to that goal.
Until either they face a happy ending or a tragic demise. After the final resolution, the story tends to wrap up pretty quickly, because the thing keeping us glued to the action has fallen away. And if you believe psychologists like Esther Perel, this makes perfect sense. From her years of experience as a couples therapist, she identifies that intense desire in relationships is found when we see our partner as, in some sense, separate from ourselves, and, in some small way, not guaranteed to stay.
By this, she does not recommend keeping relationships in a state of insecurity, but rather that couples should maintain some degree of separateness in their lives and interests to preserve a sense of the other that their partner can continually discover about. For Perel, it is partly the thrill of discovery that creates and maintains erotic tension. Funnily enough, this is particularly prevalent in romance literature. From Lady Chastely's Lover to many of the more recent Romantici books, there is a strong emphasis placed on the female lead's continual discovery of more and more aspects of their lover's character.
And Perel is not the first person to point this out. Stendhal brings this idea into full focus, specifically in the early stages of romance. So, Let's say that the crystallization process is in full swing, and we are pretty enamored with the idea of our beloved. For Stendhal, what cements this is the addition of doubt. He observes that it is the correct mixture of hope that the object of our affections will feel the same way about us, coupled with the fear that they will not, that solidifies our romantic feelings, at least in some situations and especially with short-term infatuation.
This is what he calls the second crystallization, and it is when the desirability of our beloved is firmly fixed in our minds, because we start to view them as someone who could share our feelings but could also disregard them. Mixed with the human tendency to desire what we may not be able to have, Stendhal thinks this is the perfect recipe for breeding more attachment and thus strengthening affection. In Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Mitya's love for Grushenka is inflamed not just by the attractiveness of her personal qualities or her appearance, but also by the fact that she is always just out of his grasp.
Stendhal himself tells a number of tales where people are carried away by their own hopes while at the same time becoming inflamed by their doubts. He talks of someone whose beloved barred them from seeing her except for once a fortnight. And how this slowly drove him out of his mind. The distance and fear of loss meant that he placed her value even higher, while at the same time the slim hope of winning her over through those fortnightly meetings kept him hooked. That was the ratio of doubt and hope that tapped into him.
into his particular mind in just the right way. For other people, it may be different. Stendhal is pretty clear about the individual variants at play, though he also says it often takes surprisingly little hope to keep us enamored with someone we have no chance of being with.
Of course, this also goes some way to explaining the particular pain that often comes with crushes. By its very nature, a crush is someone you desire but do not know if they desire you back. But this makes it a state that is very prone to oscillating between hope and frustration. Stendhal points out it can turn us into investigators. We search for omens about what our beloved thinks of us and rejoice when we think we've found evidence of their love.
On the other hand, we are plunged into varying levels of misery when we think there is no chance we will ever be together. Again, people can experience this to greater or lesser degrees. For many of us, the range of this oscillation will narrow as we get older. But both I and Stendhal know many adults who will easily let this cycle occupy almost all of their minds.
And this does make a certain sort of sense. The intense emotional rollercoaster going on here renders the rest of the world rather drab by comparison. I have seen many online express that their life is very stressful when they have a crush, but when they do not, they actually feel pretty bored.
And this is something Stendhal explains incredibly well. He observes that when such a strong desire is finally let go, there is a mixture of relief, but also a slight emptiness. Our will has been raging its way through our psyche only for it to just stop.
This, understandably, leaves a vacuum in its wake, one that temporarily may have us feeling a little bereft. It is a much smaller and more circumspect version of the feeling that one might have when they lose faith with their god or become disillusioned with their career. Stendhal's observations also help shed light on quite an unsavoury dynamic that can emerge in budding relationships. The term love-bombing has been used in recent years to refer to someone showering their beloved with disproportionate affection in order to engorge their hopes of a kind and loving relationship, but then withdrawing that romantic attention, leaving the other person to beg for it back piece by piece. Stendhal's analysis partly explains why this is so distressing.
The inflated affection at the beginning means someone could survive for months or even years without the light of their hope entirely going out. Then, no matter how fearful or anxious or neglected they feel, they can still cling to the idea of the relationship that held at the very start. They are kept right on the edge of despair for the entire courtship, and it is no wonder that this would hurt them deeply.
Stendhal would say that this is an extreme and unhealthy version of a pretty common thing that we often do to ourselves. It's certainly worth reflecting on, especially when we are driving ourselves crazy thinking about a crush. We may just be puppets dancing to the carefully crafted strings of hope and doubt.
This also coheres nicely with another observation Esther Perel made on infidelity. When someone leaves their partner for their affair partner, it often does not work out. In Perel's view, this is because the reason they found their affair partner so alluring was that they existed in this intersection between anxiety and hope.
and when they were no longer fit for this role, they too were discarded. And outside this context, in our own mini-infatuations, we might ask to what extent we are genuinely enamored with this person, and where have we simply become addicted to the emotional highs and lows of this cycle? Obviously, the answer will be different for every situation. And on that note, we shall now move on to examining some of the less innocent aspects of a crush, how sometimes we seek the affection of another, entirely for the purposes of our own ego. 3. Identity, Vanity, and Ego At the beginning of his work, Stendhal distinguishes between four different types of love.
There is courtly love, a sort of formal game, physical love, which is purely aimed at sex, passionate love, which is the kind of honest adulation we have been looking at thus far, and vain love. It is this last sort of love that I want to examine for this section, because it brings to light a pretty common cause behind a crush, yet one we often try to ignore. By vain love, Stendhal is referring to our tendency to develop feelings for another person, not because of who they are or their personal qualities, but because of what their affection would say about us. For instance, say that you, like me, grew up as a slightly awkward-looking and gangly teenager who often felt pretty unattractive.
Then, when you're older, you might seek the affections of other people because you feel like you require it as evidence that you're not some kind of hideous creature. but instead both acceptable and lovable. The psychoanalyst James Fosshager talks about a patient, Natalie, and how she grew up facing an awful lot of rejection from her attempts to love others.
This came out notably in her father, who would often ignore her valiant efforts to connect. Fosshager then describes how Natalie resiliently kept searching for love in its various forms, perhaps most centrally in the form of affirmation that she was a worthy, lovable person. This is because, for Fosshager, our searches for love are intimately connected with our own self-concept, and often a driving force behind seeking another's affection is our ego. A similar idea is explored by Sisyphus55 in his own video on crushes, which I will link in the description.
He references the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan said that for many people, their primary want in love is to be desired themselves. They seek for an ideal version of their self to be reflected, accepted, and affirmed in the eyes of someone they think of as admirable.
That is, they love what being loved by this person would tell them about themselves. Stendhal artfully points out that in many cases we may not be aware that this is the motive behind our infatuation, saying that vanity will pretend to be passion, and that it will do this so well it may fool even us. This makes quite a lot of sense if we lend credence to the psychological theories set out by Fosshager and Lacan.
It is not that we set out to use someone to enhance our own image, but rather that we think we are ardently desiring them. But the unconscious motivation behind this desire is to achieve this further egoistic aim. It is worth noting Stendhal does not condemn anyone for this. He just says it is one of the things that we tend to label as love, rightly or wrongly. In practice, the division between vain love and true passion is likely to be pretty blurred.
Obviously, if you hold great passion for someone, then that person loving you is going to have a positive effect on your self-image, regardless of what the original motivation for the affection was. Part of the reason why Stendhal felt the need to write a tome on love is because our reasons that we adore someone are often pretty unclear to us. You might even try to list all of the reasons that you are fond of your beloved, but at the same time it seems like there is an ineffable something that is left unarticulated.
To build on Stendhal, it is perhaps more useful to think of passion and this sort of unmalicious vanity as two motivations found in an awful lot of affection, with the mixture different for every individual person and in each individual case. But this, again, can help explain why a crush can become so painful. Sometimes it is not just our feelings, but our very self-image that is on the line. There is another kind of vain love Stendhal touches upon towards the end of his book, and that is the archetype of Don Juan. This is a person who is purely instrumental in their pursuit of others.
It does not even seem right to say that they love their beloved because they are consciously using them just as a means to an end. They are far more interested in the quantity of lovers than in the actual connection they forge with them because they are forever keeping people at an emotional distance. Stendhal here is clearly alluding to the image of the male philanderer, but there is no reason why this would have to be gendered or even limited to sex. The person who consciously keeps someone around because they feed off their validation or their material wealth will be just as much in the spirit of using someone while keeping them at an emotional distance. The key distinguishing feature is that they are so possessed with self-love that they fail to see the harm they cause and see none but themselves as capable of joy or suffering.
I like Sondal's point here for two reasons. The first is that we should probably beware of embodying Don Juan ourselves. Something observed by many of the greatest ethical thinkers in history, from Aristotle to C.S. Lewis to Hannah Arendt, is that the road to becoming cruel is very long and has only a slight decline.
We may not begin by wishing to use someone in this way, but slowly, over time, we fall into a habit, and then that becomes a character trait. And before we know it, we have caused another person real harm without setting out to do anything of the sort. Importantly, Stendhal thinks that falling into this instrumental attitude will bar us off from any long-term happiness in romance, because by keeping everyone at a distance we ensure that we will never form a genuine close connection with anyone either. But secondly, it highlights the importance of taking care who we fall for. As we said in the previous section, often doubts about someone's affections have the effect of making us pine after them even more.
But this can become a very dangerous dynamic if... like a Don Juan, they are consciously trying to provoke this reaction in order to better have us under their thumb. They might face the consequences of this approach in the long term, but in the short term we will suffer intensely. When it comes to affection, the stakes are, ultimately, extraordinarily high, because in the right hands a budding crush can be gently nursed into an obsession, all while they have no intention of either reciprocating our feelings or putting us out of our misery and revealing that they do not feel the same way.
Of course, this only holds in the case of outright malice, which I would hope to be pretty rare. But finally, I want to compare Stendhal's approach to some other philosophies and play devil's advocate to the idea that crushes are inherently foolish. 4. Dignifying the crush When we think of what a crush is, we tend to imagine something very infantile.
We dismiss it as the stuff of school playgrounds and adolescent daydreams, not fit for the dignified business of adult life. Sure, we once had crushes, but then we put away childish things and now see them as only fit for the immature. As François de La Rochefoucauld once observed, loving often takes on such an importance that we feel it is almost embarrassing in hindsight, and we sometimes do our best to hide or condemn our previous infatuations in order to restore our sense of dignity. And perhaps this is only right. After all, various schools of philosophy have aimed at a kind of mental peace that passionate affection will disrupt.
Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, identified desire as a negative state because it will disturb the natural calm that he called joy. And this was echoed by later authors like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, who had warned against letting the slings and arrows of external life affect our internal states. Schopenhauer argued that the only hope we have for escaping the cycles of unhappiness that pervade life is to gradually rein in our own desires until we become natural ascetics. And the thing about passionate affection is that it tends to smash our inner calm to pieces.
By its nature as a strong and emotionally invested desire, it seizes our minds by the scruff of the neck and forces us to care an awful lot about something entirely out of our hands, whether a given person shares our feelings about them. Essentially, what these philosophers quite rightly point out is that passion increases the emotional amplitude of our lives. For instance, a familiar pattern in a crush is that we become overjoyed at hope and despair at doubt, but either way, calm indifference is left pretty much in the dust.
But it's worth asking, is there some philosophical value in this more impassioned approach as well? A famous critic of Stoicism was Friedrich Nietzsche, who pointed out that the Stoic philosophy sacrificed the extreme highs of life in order to also avoid the extreme lows. He proposed a radically different alternative, one that places a far higher value on the passionate and instinctive sides of our natures. Nietzsche does not want us to be led fully by our passions, but he worries that the Stoic approach can be used to dull our emotional sides rather than learning to harness and direct them. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, one of the characteristics of his Übermensch is that they rejoice in their own suffering.
Rather than setting out to limit the variance of their emotional states, they lend their pain meaning and thereby make it not only bearable, but something to be celebrated. This is a sort of difficult and rather extreme concept to get your head around. But an everyday example of the same idea might be the parent who not only willingly sacrifices their own mental state for their children, but positively celebrates doing so. We might also think of Camus'absurd man, who does not so much run away from their feelings, but uses them as a self-justifying reason to continue living, in spite of the absurdity of life.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, he describes those who are overcome with a natural passion for existence, such that they do not hope for some objective meaning to the universe, and yet they live unrepentantly and fully, embracing both their despair and their joy with equal enthusiasm. In some ways, these two approaches form contrasting elements in a philosophy of life that we can choose to balance. The extent to which we become stoic, in this sense of the word, will also be the extent that we limit our emotional amplitude and value calm over passion. and vice versa. The thing about crushes and instinctive affection more generally is that if we cannot stop them outright they give us some reason for exploring the alternative approach, at least in this area.
Another of Stendhal's observations is that it is just not that easy to dislodge romantic passion once it takes hold. As he puts it, The very idea of ceasing to love is absurd when your convictions are confirmed moment by moment until the passing months make love a habit. And in such a situation, it is easy to become embarrassed.
We have a tendency to prize being calm and collected and to gently demonize being out of control in any way. But there are times when it is genuinely difficult to get a handle on our feelings, with passionate affection being such a classic example. And for these situations, we may require a philosophy that can teach us how to embrace and lend dignity to this feeling.
Throughout the whole book, Stendhal attempts to do this. He does not mock us for our passions, but instead reassures us that they are perfectly normal, and in some cases can even increase our joy. At the same time, he does not shy away from the downsides of passion and acknowledges that they can cause intense pain.
He does this without condemning us, but instead looking at us with clear eyes. He reminds us that, for many people, this is a part of being human and an incredibly meaningful component of it at that. He does not join in the mocking cries that such passion is inherently idiotic but rather recognises the irrational aspects of the human mind and even goes so far as to appreciate them.
After all, such irrationalism in this sphere has done an excellent job at ensuring our species has survived to the present day. I really enjoy Stendhal's book. because he presents an idea of passionate affection that does not glorify it by ignoring all of its negative aspects and turning it into something it's not, but rather affirms the potential value and desirability of human passion while recognising it as a trade-off.
The more passion we allow into our lives, the less calm we will have. For Stendhal, this is not necessarily a foolish choice to make, but one we can affirm or deny with our eyes open, and a clear idea of its benefits and its drawbacks. In short, for Stendhal, a crush hurts because its necessary components facilitate both the heights of joy and the depths of despair. And it is up to us to decide whether we are happy with this deal or whether we would rather trade in some of our passion for a touch more calm. The balance will be highly individual, but recognizing the tension between these two approaches will help us choose how to set it in our own lives.
Because for Stendhal, passion does not present a problem to be solved. but rather a brilliant and dangerous force that each of us would do well to wrestle with, either to defeat it or to embrace it. And if you want to explore some of these ideas in further detail, as well as many others about love, then check out my deep dive into the problems of modern dating right here.
And stick around for more on Thinking to Improve Your Life.