The One That Got Away (and the Worms Ate into his Brain)

If you're a romantic at heart put your hands in the air! If you've had a major crush on someone put your hands in the air! If you've built that person up way too much in your head that you've become so uncomfortable and insecure around them that you sabotage yourself from any successful or rational relationship with that person put your hands in the air!

Because I'm an expert on overthinking and overthinking to the point that I lose touch with reality, I figured I'd go into the great self-deprecating head trap that is the one-way relationship. To define simply, this is a relationship you have with someone else, except that someone else is completely in your head. The person in your head could be made up, or, more often than not, this person is based on a real live person you know of or even interact with on regular basis. But the main distinction of this one-way relationship is that no matter how real this person in your head seems to you, at the end of the day, they will simply be a figure of your imagination.

This kind of relationship is inevitable and basically essential to all types of relationships in that you simply cannot possibly be interacting with another person for every waking second of the day, so when you both are separate from each other you need an image of this person to occupy your mind and keep in tact everything you know about them. This can be said about really anything you interact with and then maintain an idea of in your head, even your own face, since you (presumably) aren't able to constantly see what you look like.

Maintaining accurate versions of these images and ideas in your head that are as close to their real-life counterparts as possible is essential in not letting the images take over how you think or act with regard to them, especially when it comes to your image of another person (I have a feeling this bridges on a lot of Kant's(?) philosophy of the legitimacy of any "reality" we hold in our head versus the reality we can never see objectively in real life, but that's for another post). However, maintaining an accurate image of another person, an entity so varied and subject to fluctuation, is incredibly hard, so often times the best image is actually one that leaves a little room for unpredictability, as frustrating as that is.

The problem is that once you commit more to the image in your head than the one in reality you lose your hold on reality, as nice and wonderful as this may be. See below from Taxi Driver:



Once you lift up an image of a person beyond all faults and all basic aspects of humanity to the point of divinity, well, you're going to have a hard time coming to terms with the actual real life version of that person, and an even harder time communicating on the same level with them. This sort of holy praise is dictated eloquently through this scene from The 40 Year Old Virgin:



So if you never even make that move toward the real-life version of your fantasy crush, you run the risk of much deeper and darker consequences. To continue the string of references I have going, see below for a quote from Ferris Bueller's Day Off in which Ferris describes Cameron's romantic prospects for the future - for those who don't know, Cameron is Ferris's goofy best friend, worried about all the rules Ferris breaks, who keeps to himself, and is far less socially inclined than Ferris, but a much deeper character than the cannot-possibly-do-harm Ferris.

"Cameron has never been in love - at least, nobody's ever been in love with him. If things don't change for him, he's gonna marry the first girl he lays, and she's gonna treat him like shit, because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won't respect him, 'cause you can't respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn't work."

The alternative to these extremes, and probably a more realistic scenario of the one-way relationship, is the murky and gray mix of the one-way-heavy two-way relationship where any real dialogue and connection you achieve with the person or crush of interest is hampered and even distorted by what's going on in your own head. Lot of jargon for a simple outcome. You're overthinking everything. Talk to her, ask her how she feels, and go from there.

I had this exact situation when I thought I had found the end-all, be-all of girls in high school and went head over heels into my own head trap of a crush on a girl. I spent more time thinking about all the cool things about her than actually talking to her and hanging out with her. When I eventually did go with her to the homecoming dance (what really sparked off the one-way relationship), it set me off, and I had one of the best nights of my life, finally breaking through my shell and connecting with someone who seemed to, oh god don't make me say it, "get me".

That wasn't the problem. The problem was that afterward when I played the usual aftermath games of "when should I call?", "how does she feel about the night, about me?", "what the hell is the next move to make?", I didn't ever really get past those games and into actually taking the next step and trying something, putting myself out there with the chance of failing. Instead, I hesitated and wondered and waited, until eventually it was awkward out of my own nervousness, and whatever connection I had with the real version of the girl evaporated, and all that was left was my distorted and tortured nebulous image in my head of her and me failing repeatedly. If you never get out of that self-fulfilling prophecy you will spiral down and only dig yourself deeper. It took me a long time to let go of my mind's image of her so that all that's left is a faded memory with a lot of room for error and unpredicatability, which is only erased when I actually talk to her. Because in reality, in spite of all my head trips and traps, I don't really know her that well. She's a great girl by all means, but I never actually got to know her; I was too busy letting it all get into my head.

And so I leave you with Beck, a troubled, head-trapped Jim Carrey, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: