there are seven kinds of crush
free, on one page.

what you’ll work through

1. the romantic crush. you want to be chosen. the whole architecture of it: the being someone’s person, the long term, the future with them in it.
2. the sexual crush. you want them physically. almost everybody treats this and the romantic one as the same thing. they are not: Lisa Diamond’s 2003 model has desire running on the gonadal hormones and attachment on the oxytocin systems, two systems with two origins.
3. the squish. a crush that wants a friendship. identical intensity, sometimes more: the rehearsing, the rereading your own message, noticing what they wore. no romantic or sexual intent at all. you want to be their person, platonically.
4. the aesthetic crush. you want to look at them. that is the whole request. you do not take a sunset home, and nobody asks you to justify being moved by a painting.
5. the intellectual crush. you want their mind. six hours of talking, then the whole night. the trouble is that from outside, being that interested in someone looks exactly like flirting, so both of you can misread it.
6. the sensual crush. you want to be touched by them, not sexually at all. there is a dedicated system in the body for affectionate touch that is separate from the sexual one, so this is not a diluted version of anything.
7. the one nobody puts on the list. you do not want them. you want to BE them. admiration, aspiration, gender envy. it produces every symptom of a romantic crush: thinking about them constantly, studying them, noticing how they hold a room.