Why Do I Keep Getting Crushes on People I Don’t Like?

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

I am a teenager who has a small dilemma: I often get crushes on people or fictional characters who are conventionally unattractive. They can be overweight, ugly, have terrible personalities, or be weird, but often I will have crushes on those people despite their flaws. Usually I will just look past the flaws and focus on the good things about them. This doesn’t apply to all of my crushes, but it is frequent enough that I wonder if it is wrong to crush on unattractive people. Is this weird? If it is, what should I do about it?

Thanks for all your hard work!

Unhelpful Brain

So, funny thing about crushes, UB: they just kinda happen. Despite what a lot of folks often believe – or, fear, for that matter – is that they don’t reveal any deep, dark secrets about you. Getting a crush on someone when you’re married or in a relationship, for example, doesn’t mean that you don’t actually love your partner, or that there’s something wrong with your relationship. Neither, for that matter does getting a crush on someone fictional mean that you can’t “handle real women”, or that you’re not emotionally mature or whatever. All a crush ultimately means is that you’re a standard-issue human with the standard issue wetware that we pretty much all get issued by birth.

There really isn’t any rhyme or reason why we’ll get a crush on somebody. You might realize you have a crush on someone (or develop a crush on them) because you had a particularly spicy dream about them, or because they did something that made you happy or feel validated. You might get a crush on someone – especially a fictional character – because of what they represent to you or because of some aspect of their personality or presentation. People get crushes on folks they know incredibly well, folks they see at a glance, people they talk to once or who they see over and over again but never speak to.

Hell, you may find yourself developing a crush on someone you outright loathe, which can really bake your noodle if you’re not used to them.

The only thing that a crush says about you is that there’s something about that particular person that just hits you in the exact right way. It may be physical, it may be emotional or it may be purely representational, but there’s something about them that tickles your fancy (or other bits). That’s it.

This is why every crush you have will have one thing in common: you find them attractive in some way, shape or form. Now, this can seem confusing to a lot of people; why would you develop that seemingly random infatuation on someone you don’t think is hot, or who you think is an awful person? But that’s the thing about attraction: not only is it not rational but it’s not strictly physical or emotional. Attraction is a multi-axis graph; someone may not be your usual type (more on this in a second), but there’s other aspects to them that appeal to you – their personality, their voice, their behavior, even just the attitude and aura they give off. You may, for example, find someone less than hot, but there’s just something about them that radiates sex appeal to you. Or they could be your mortal enemy and you wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire because you don’t want to waste the moisture… but the passion behind that feeling gets sublimated into desire. It’s weird, often surprising… but completely and utterly normal. It’s possibly distressing, in the event that it’s someone you actively don’t like. But normal.

Humans are basically ghosts summoned by shooting electricity through tapioca and are then tasked to pilot robots made out of meat; it shouldn’t be surprising that we end up feeling weird shit about other people on occasion.

But I was a wee bit less than truthful when I said that crushes don’t reveal any deep dark secrets about you. Remember what I said about how someone may not be your usual type? Well, occasionally what you’ll discover is that your type… isn’t actually your type. That is, you may not be as aware of who you find attractive as you think.

Yeah, I know, this sounds insane. How could you, the person who gets the 24/7 feed of the inside of your head, not know who you’re attracted to? Well, that gets back to the whole “people are complex and weird” part. There’re a lot of things that affect not just who we are attracted to but to who we assume we’re attracted to. A lot of people, for example, don’t realize just how much social pressure can dictate who we approach or try to date. We believe we’re supposed to be into a particular type of look or build or personality because other people – society, our peers, even just cultural osmosis – have told us over and over again that we’re supposed to be into X type of people with Y bodies and Z looks. But sometimes what we think we’re supposed to want and what we actually want can come in conflict.

A lot of people who are into fat women, for example, often don’t fully recognize or accept their attraction until they’ve matured to the point that they’re able to own their attraction and not give a damn about the “but what do my friends/strangers think?” factor. Others have found themselves pursuing women who fit a particular look or aesthetic – Big Titty Goth GF, e-girl, Girl Next Door, gingers, large breasts, small breasts, etc. – more out of inertia than actual attraction. They were attracted to that type or look at one point in their lives, but their tastes have grown or changed. Because they still see being into that type as part of their identity, they have a hard time accepting that it may have changed.

Or for that matter, they may have told themselves that they’re not into a particular type or personality because they worry about what it says about them. Maybe they represent the opposite of the values they grew up with, or a lifestyle or personality type that they were always told they shouldn’t want.

Weird? Absolutely. But hey, attraction has nothing to do with logic or coherence. As the man once said, love’s not brains, it’s blood screaming at you to to work it’s will. So if you do a little introspection and look closely at the unusual people you’ve found yourself attracted to, you may well discover that what you think you find attractive and what actually attracts you don’t overlap perfectly.

Or it could be as simple as there’s just something about that person that just does it for you and it’s different for each unusual or inconvenient crush.

However is it wrong to get a crush on “unattractive” people? I’d say I don’t understand the question, except I suspect that you’re equating “having a crush” with “need to do something about it”… which are two very different things. Having a crush on someone is ultimately neutral, neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. It’s just a feeling. It’s what you do about those feelings that is right or wrong. If you’re attracted to people you wouldn’t want to date – which is absolutely a thing that happens – then there’s really not a problem; you simply don’t date them. A crush is not a mandate, just like a boner’s not a commandment. You can be attracted to someone and not do anything about it. You can get some pantsfeels for Jesse’s girl, but it’s only a problem if you act on it.

(And, y’know, if Jesse’s girl isn’t into you and Jesse and his partner aren’t monogamous, but now we’re getting way the hell off track.)

If you’re having crushes on people you don’t want to pursue something with, then all you need to do is nothing. Seriously. Just let things be, and the crush will fade in due time. Crushes are like fires; if you feed it, it’ll grow. If you don’t give it fuel, it’ll go out on its own. And yes, trying to repress a crush is feeding it fuel. All you’re doing is reinforcing the state of having a crush on someone. Instead, all you need to do is note it and name it – “oh, there’s my crush on Samantha” – and then gently redirect your attention elsewhere. It’ll fade on its own without any real need for prompting from you.

Don’t worry about those weird crushes, UB. They’re perfectly normal. If they’re not something you want to pursue, then just let them be, and they’ll go away on their own.

Good luck.

Hi Dr. NerdLove,

I know this is probably a bit outside the norm for questions you answer, but I’ve gotten my first online crush with someone I met on a discord server. It is also my first crush on another man. I’ve known I was bisexual for years, but this is the first time I’ve been attracted to a man, instead of just thinking they look hot. If it may be relevant, I have ADHD and high functioning autism, I’m able to interact with others fine for the most part, but have never developed the social-emotional skills to handle this.

Do you have any advice on how I should go forward with this? Right now I’ve decided to just get to know him better before doing anything. I know we share interests and that he is into other men as well, and that in the past he had wanted an online relationship with someone. I’ve only known him for a couple weeks but I can’t remember feeling this way about anyone, which feels a little embarrassing to admit at 35.

Help?

Sincerely,
Mr. Out of His Depth

First and foremost: there’s nothing to be embarrassed about here, OOHD. You have your first crush on a guy; that’s absolutely normal. There really is nothing wrong, weird or even all that embarrassing about it. There’s no age at which you’re supposed to have experienced these feelings before. In fact, a lot of queer people across the gender spectrum often discover that they’re not straight (or not completely straight) later in life; it’s almost a cliche at times. So all of this is absolutely normal. There’s no shame to be had here, it’s just an experience you haven’t had until now.

Hopefully, this is a fun experience for you because hey, crushes are often fun! It can be a real rush, with the dopamine and oxytocin flooding your system and making your head feel all swimmy and your heart going bing-bang-bing-bong at the thought of them. In some ways, it can make you feel almost like a kid again, experiencing puppy love for the first time with all it’s teen intensity and novelty.

But since this is your first crush on a guy, and considering the circumstances, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Think of this as a sort of best practices when it comes to newly discovered attraction, especially if you don’t have much social or relationship experience.

First and foremost: you need to recognize that while your feelings are absolutely real, what you have is a crush on a fantasy of a person, not the person themselves. It’s like you said: you’ve only known this guy a couple of weeks and – crucially – you know him over Discord. You know very, very little about him except what little you’ve seen online. That’s going to be important to keep in mind going forward because when you have a little information and a lot of empty spaces, then it’s very easy to fill in those spaces with your own ideas about who this guy is, rather than who he actually is. It becomes less about your crush as a holistic individual and more about things you’re assigning to him that may or may not be accurate. The more info you fill in yourself, the less the person in your head will resemble the person in real life.

That’s not a small thing. I’ve seen a lot of folks who’ve spun up ideas about a person they’re attracted to out of whole cloth – building entire lives based entirely around their assumptions and beliefs about what they think a person who looks, sounds or writes like their crush would or should be like. When they deal with the real person instead of the construct that they’ve built up in their head and put on a pedestal… well, when the fantasy and the reality clash, things tend to get messy.

Think of it as the emotional equivalent of writing fan-fic about a character in a show or a book series; what one writes in one’s fan fiction can vary wildly from the canonical version of the character. But at the end of the day the one on the page or screen is the “real” one, and the fan fic is just the canon that lives in your head.

To be fair: you seem to be pretty self-aware, since you say you’re fully cognizant of the fact that you know little about him and you want to get to know him better. That’s great! That’s exactly what you should be doing. The crush you’re feeling now may change as you learn more about him. That’s not to say that it will definitely grow and become more than limerence, or that it’ll fade and you’ll wonder what you ever saw in him. It just means that right now you don’t know much about him, and what you don’t know is often very important. You’ve only seen a very small slice, not the whole of him, or even a significant chunk. Despite what we often think, the way we come across online and the way we are in the flesh can be pretty different, even radically so.

But speaking of the flesh… another thing to consider is that attraction isn’t just about the soul. I know it’s tempting to think of getting to know someone online as a way of getting to know the real person and that their soul or personality is everything… and that might be true if we were beings of pure information. But we’re not, we’re beings of meat and blood and bone and all the crazy chemical interactions that come with it. One of the things we often don’t realize is how much of what dictates who we’re attracted to and who we’re compatible can only be determined when we’re in physical proximity to one another. There are scores of subtle traits and factors – many so subtle that we don’t consciously perceive them – that affect attraction. The way he smells or the way he tastes when you kiss, the way he moves, the exact pitch and timbre of his voice… these are all things that can’t be determined even over video; they’re all things you only truly learn when you’re sharing the same space.

This is why so many dating app matches fizzle; you can have great chemistry over text or even video chat, but find them as arousing as a plank of wood when you meet up in person.

And that’s not even getting into things like “how does he treat the waitstaff at restaurants and bars” or “how does he behave when he’s thwarted in getting something he wants”? These, too, can turn Hottie McHotterson into someone you wouldn’t fuck with a borrowed dick and Li’l Nas X doing the pushing.

Now all this having been said: for crushing out on a guy for the first time, you seem to have a solid head on your shoulders, and that’s a good thing. The intensity and thrill of a crush can cause a lot of people – even people with lots of relationships under their belt, who should absolutely know better – to lose their heads and make stupid decisions. So my suggestion for you is to recognize this for what it is: an infatuation on someone you don’t know at all. The best thing you can do right now is just slow your roll and give everything time. You want time to get to know this guy, time to see if there’s more to him than the little you’ve seen thus far and time to see whether this crush of yours will be like a comet – bright, flashy and gone in an instant – or something a little more enduring.

I would also suggest that you don’t take it any more seriously than you would having a crush on a woman you barely know. It’s just a little crush, not a sign from God or a mandate from the universe, and it’s definitely not something to make life-altering decisions over. The last thing you want to do is set yourself up for disappointment and unnecessary heartache. First crushes tend to be fleeting things, not loves to last a lifetime, or even months. The odds are good that this feeling will fade in time, especially as you meet compatible guys in person. 

Now that doesn’t mean that something might not bloom from this. It’s not likely to be serious or to last, but it does occasionally happen. If that does happen, that’s awesome! But I wouldn’t plan on it or build up any expectations around it. If, as you get to know this guy over time and assuming that you and he strike up some sort of friendship or other connection, you have an opportunity to meet in person? Look at it as a chance to meet a friend, not to consummate some long-held fantasy.

But for now? Enjoy the feeling for what it is, without taking it too seriously. If it’s going to be something serious, then that will develop in time.

Good luck.