The Horror of Having a Crush in the Social Media Age

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.

These days, we can burrow down into the mystery of someone we might have feelings for, trying to dig up every worm. Some of us believe that this can dilute or intensify the experience, and it can, but not in the ways we imagine.

In my day job as a counsellor and social worker, I have worked with many people addicted to escaping their realities. Humans can’t always cope with what we have been through, and the ongoing effects of trauma and mental illness can lead to addiction. Escape can be found through our phones, the internet and social media, just as it can be found in alcohol, drugs and sex.

When I started to notice my own reliance on my phone, I also started to write a character who was consumed by hers. The phone of my new novel Worry Doll’s protagonist, Heloise, is her best friend and her worst enemy. She picks it up and puts it down, her use unmanageable. She tries to make rules for herself and breaks them. In the same way Heloise is addicted to love, she is addicted to checking and scrolling. She wants love, connection, approval and reassurance, but she is looking for it in places it can’t be found. Interactions with her phone and her crush mimic the experiences she desires, becoming obsessions that take her away from reality.

Like alcohol or drugs, many of us have become addicted to our phones: the scrolling, the notifications, the endless stimuli. Our brains have become reliant on these pops of dopamine. If we put our phone away, we are left with nothing but ourselves. In the throes of a crush, we search for digital intimacy. Perhaps there is no such thing.

When writing Worry Doll, I wanted to explore the way a crush can take over our consciousness and render us insane. The characters abandon themselves for the unknown quantity of another, but the sacrifice plays with their realities, leading the reader to question their own. I wanted the book to read like a horror movie: without the blood and guts but with all of the perversion.

I recently watched Obsession, the new independent horror movie starring Inde Navarrette as the most deliciously unhinged girlfriend I’ve ever witnessed. When Bear (Michael Johnstone) makes a wish using a cursed novelty item, the One Wish Willow, from a woo woo store, he asks for what we have all wanted—requited love. His wish comes true, but it’s not a happy thing. He is cornered and haunted by the very fantasy he indulged for so long.

The movie says, in no uncertain terms, that having a crush on someone is a figment of the imagination. It reminds us that we can’t understand or control the way another person feels about us, or how they see the world. It achieves what I hope to achieve with my book: a blurring of what is possible in order to focus on what is not. The exaggeration of yearning, obsession and forgetting creates a version of the fantasy world we have all lived in.

Perhaps this is why it feels so breathless, so urgent, so delulu, to have a crush on someone—and why we will go out of our way to feel close to them, even if that means rewatching their Instagram story over and over. Our body starts to panic because it doesn’t know what might happen and can’t find out, despite how much we try. We have all gone out of our minds just to see their face again.

Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne is out now