A Crushing Feeling

The more we frustrate ourselves in wanting something, the more we value our desire for it. As Adam Phillips notes in Missing Out, Freud argues that “the psychical significance of a drive rises in proportion to its frustration” (2013: 5). The paradox at the centre of Freud’s thought is that more frustration is what makes the desire significant; the wanting itself is what charges the object with meaning. When desire is immediately met, neither the desire nor its object gets fully imagined; both remain thin, provisional. The frustration is what gives the object weight. When discussing frustration, Phillips also notes that in tragedies the issue is usually not simply that people do not get what they want, but that the protagonists discover that their wanting itself does not work. The distinction is not between stories of people failing to get what they want, but of people receiving less and less of what they thought they wanted. Tragedy unfolds when the belief collapses, and wanting itself becomes self-destructive. Freud writes that the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle, which postpones satisfaction. He also suggests that this pleasure principle is the mind’s basic mode of operating, but that it is too risky to guide behaviour on its own in a difficult external world. For that reason, the ego’s self-preserving instincts gradually impose the reality principle, which does not reject pleasure altogether but requires delay, compromise, and tolerance of discomfort on the way to eventual satisfaction (1975: 27).

The Freudian principle is effectively captured in that Rolling Stones’ song:

You can't always get what you want

You can't always get what you want

You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find

You get what you need

Ah baby, yeah..

In What Am I, A Deer? (2026), the debut novel about the pleasures and humiliations of yearning for a crush, Polly Barton explores limerence in a milieu of heteropessimism. In an interview with Jemima Skala for DazedDigital, she states exactly how the completion of a crush is seeing through the reality, and only when the fantasy is shattered you can see it for what it is, always containing an element of ridiculousness and risk, devastated by the lack of information, like a drug that puts you in an altered state in a world of blind hope and intoxication.

Asa Seresin, who proposed the heteropessimism term as a disillusionment with performative heterosexuality, says that the straight experience seems structurally exhausting, repetitive and unequal, and has generally a heavy focus on men as a root of the problem. However, of course, it is not simply men who constitute the problem. In response to Freud’s infamous question, “What do women want?”, Nina Power offers an ironic catalogue of women's stereotypical desires like shoes, chocolate, handbags, babies, curling tongs washed out by white wine. Yet she suggests that it is insufficient to claim that advertising, magazines, and cinema merely “sell a lie”, since contemporary models of femininity generate a more complex network of desires and contradictory expectations (2009: 30-31). So, at times, in such a foolhardy state of desire for recognition in both sexes, a crush can be understood as a layered system in which psychological, symbolic, and institutional forces converge to produce what appears as individual longing but is in fact structurally mediated. This structure is intensified in contemporary digital environments, where dating apps or social media apps formalise visibility, comparison, and competition, turning desire into a continuous field of mediated exposure.

Adam Phillips says about the frustration of not getting what you want that we “choose by exclusion”, and that we may need to think of ourselves as living a double life, “the one that we wish for and the one that we practice” (2013: 1). So the difference is not simply loss versus possession. His point is that the life we have is always lived in relation to the life we do not have, and the lost life remains inside the lived one as fantasy, comparison, and desire rather than standing outside it as a separate realm.

Ivan Illich, specifically discussing genderless individualism and the transition from the reign of gender to the reign of sex, argues that an industrial society can not exist unless it imposes some unisex assumptions: the assumption that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs (1982: 9). Talking about comparison and competition, Illich proposes the term of invidious individualism where in the recent economy we tend toward a kind of unsexed envy, unknown to the past, saying that malevolent disparagement between men and women is not a new social phenomenon and that the institutionalization of lifelong invidious comparison between genderless individuals is historically unprecedented (13).

Returning to a lighter argument, one that does not expose so brutally the crush as an envious feeling, in Crushes Should Lightly Humiliate You, an article in the magazine The Cut, J. P. Brammer suggests that a crush strips away our hard-won adult composure, the kind we might be better off loosening anyway. He states that maybe it is the embarrassment of a crush that comes from how plainly it exposes what’s missing in our lives, as to have a crush is to start picturing the small, appealing routines of intimacy: quiet Friday nights in, being folded into someone’s circle of friends, the easy flirtation of dinner plans shaped by playful disagreement. And often, those being imagined don’t actually exist in one’s (current) life. Even these modest, everyday fantasies can begin to feel faintly unreal, as if wanting them already tips into something excessive. “The crush dispossesses you of adult sophistication, which we could sometimes use a little less of” (2026).

But it is infatuation that gives the feeling of bizarreness, like being pulled outside yourself into an intensity you can’t control. A concentrated attention toward something that resists you, pushing you toward risk, a sense of self-recognition that turns almost uncomfortable, even cringeworthy. Are you thinking like a psychopath with a goal? The goal of dissecting every part of it (the object of desire), every image, every glimpse of its personality, every rictus, every smile. Robbing it of its identity and projecting with extreme focus and morbidity an articulation of your impossible self.

If you go to the meta-layer of the crush and ask what is going on here, you allow yourself to understand more about your taste, your authenticity and your concept of self. Of course, a crush is information, an accumulation to a point of sufficiency of how you approach things, how your sensibility works (is it more into victimisation or is it more into audacity and fortitude, or both). What is your pattern of attention, desire and attachment style? The recognition permits different readings and potentialities, but has its implications in the sense of disorientation a crush expresses. At the same time, the vulnerability exposed by a crush is something that needs to be hidden because it can also be an expression of impotence, stagnation, and exhaustion or simply put: the expression of a tragedy.

The crush can be a failure to transpose yourself into a civilized persona or an envious genderless attack on your petit object a of Lacan, or perhaps something closer to a rupture, even a hallucination, a projection of your ego in its alterity. The only way to move forward is to understand it and unfold it until it reaches a point of irrelevance.

But, of course, this is not an easy thing to do.