WTF Is A Crush, Anyway?

While putting together Bustle’s weeklong inquiry into the pleasure and pain of crushes, we noticed a few things. First, some of you are low-key freaks. Second, talking about crushes can bring people together in unexpected ways. And third, how we’re crushing is often as central to the experience as whom we’re crushing on. “Crush” is a state of mind. The energy of a new crush can simmer or burn hot. It can be totally paralyzing or life-alteringly productive. We can nurse it quietly within ourselves, or it can light us up from the inside, visible to everyone who looks at us — whether we like it or not.

Crushing may be universal, but the feelings involved are slippery little suckers. So for the grand finale of Crush Week, we’re charting the anatomy of a crush, from the beginning sparks to the bubble-bursting reality checks. And we’re doing it with the help of a panel — convened via separate interviews — of some of the smartest and funniest people on the internet, including: powerhouse podcasters and comedians; reality-TV all-stars; beloved authors whose books have changed the way we think about relationships; and a K-pop powerhouse who makes heartbeats go ddu-du ddu-du.

What does a crush feel like to you?

Jisoo (Blackpink superstar and solo artist, who just released her first mini album, AMORTAGE): Like a wave of emotions that hits you at your core. It’s scary. It’s adorable. It’s amazing! I sing about this exact feeling in my new song “Earthquake.”

Margaret Cho (standup comedy icon — currently on her Live and Livid tour — and musician whose new album, Lucky Gift, is out now): It’s like your pupils widen. You take in more light when that person’s around because you want to perceive more of them. You’re more aware of what’s happening because you want to be more aware of yourself around this person.

Parvati Shallow (reality TV legend from Survivor, The Traitors, and Deal or No Deal Island, which airs Tuesdays on NBC; author of Nice Girls Don’t Win, out July 8): It’s this pull you get from inside. It draws you toward something that feels like a soft little kitten or a baby panda on its back, rolling around in the soft grass. You just want to tickle its tummy and feed it a daisy.

Hunter Harris (writer and Substack queen behind the newsletter Hung Up; cohost of the Lemme Say This podcast): It simultaneously feels like you’re having every eyelash plucked out individually — awful. But also, you’re floating: “They are the funniest person I’ve ever met! How can I talk to them again?!” Scheming is such an important part of a crush.

Jake Shane (Therapuss host and comedian who begins a national tour this month): Every crush feels different for me because I mold my personality based on who I’m around. Is that horrible?

Sasha Colby (your favorite drag queen’s favorite drag queen, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15): The word says it all. It’s a bunch of emotions that you create that are pretty short-lived — it’s pretty crushing when it starts, and it’s crushing when it ends.

How does a crush affect your everyday life? What’s the best part?

Casey McQuiston (author of hit romance novels including Red, White & Royal Blue and The Pairing): If you don’t have that little dopamine button in your brain, then it feels like something’s missing. It doesn’t even have to be a romantic crush or about physical attraction. It can also be a creative crush or a style crush. But I love to collect crushes. I find crushes super inspirational, especially as a romance writer.

Tinx (advice expert, podcast host and author whose debut novel, Hotter in the Hamptons, arrives May 6): Sometimes the word crush is reduced to something really juvenile, like a teenage girl being obsessed with a celebrity, but I have always said that I run on crush power. There is no better feeling than when you have a crush. If someone could bottle that feeling, they would be a trillionaire. Because a crush is hopeful.

Candace Bushnell (the “OG Carrie Bradshaw” and author of Sex and the City and other books who’s touring her one-woman show in 2025): If you have a crush on somebody at work, it makes you want to — as my grandmother would say — fix yourself up. It makes you want to go to the gym.

Casey Wilson (actor, comedian, and essayist beloved for the podcast Bitch Sesh and Happy Endings): There’s always a work crush. I do love if I’m on a set and a camera person is cute. It’s just like, “Give me something to get out of bed for!”

Haley Mlotek (author of No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, out Feb. 18): I remember joking at the beginning of [the Zoom era] that I developed this pattern of looking in every meeting for one person to have a crush on and one person to make my enemy. To make life interesting! Some people have a tendency anytime you’re in a group setting to look for the most crush-worthy person — just to see!

Candace Bushnell: When people spend a lot of time together, especially if there’s a deadline or if it’s a heightened “We’ve got to get this done!” kind of thing, people develop feelings for each other. If you’re with somebody in a stressful, heightened situation, you are more sexually attracted to them. That’s why on The Bachelor they want people to do something scary.

Margaret Cho: A crush reminds me that I’m a sexual person, and it reminds me that I’m a vital person. It reminds me that I’m attractive and that I want to attract. I have a sexuality that deserves to be acknowledged; it doesn’t necessarily need to be engaged in, but it exists. It allows me to take a little more time in the physical adornments that I would put on my body and spend more time with my own beauty.

Parvati Shallow: A crush wakes up some dormant energy in you. You show up as your best self. Esther Perel talks about eros — that energy of passion and desire that lives inside of us, and that energy is so activating. You’re not slogging to the office if you have an office crush; there’s a pep in your step when you get out of bed and throw on your cute outfit and put on some Sabrina Carpenter. You float into the office like a twinkly little firefly. That energy makes life worth living.

It’s not all fun, of course — let’s talk about the worst parts of a crush.

Jisoo: The best and worst parts of a crush are one in the same — the excitement and fear of the unknown.

Casey Wilson: In my heyday of crushes, which was age 10 to 32, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t stop talking about the person. I would find any opportunity with any human to bring my crush up, [even when it] didn’t make sense. You just feel out of the atmosphere. You’re in outer space — financially, sexually, physically, mentally.

Jake Shane: I had a crush on this guy in college that took over my entire life for a year and a half. It ruined my life because I just talked about it all the time. I had a full on mental breakdown over him outside of Macaroni Republic in downtown LA, and my friends literally thought a family member died. Now I look back on it like, “Was it ever that serious?” I’ve realized he wasn't as happy as I thought he was.

Hunter Harris: There’s some kind of mania to it: “He didn’t like my Instagram story! He didn’t comment on this!” Or you're reading into everything 50 times deeper than it needs to be because you’re so trying to suss out if they feel the same way.

Casey McQuiston: The will-we-or-won’t-we is the best time and the worst time because every time your phone buzzes, you’re like, “Oh my God, is that you?” Or: “Did they post that Instagram story because they know I like that song?” I mean, who among us has not laid a snare in the Close Friends? Anybody who says that they haven’t done that is full of sh*t. Why else would they have invented the Close Friends story?

And yet… aren’t the painful parts of a crush also kind of the best part?

Casey Wilson: I 100% agree, especially for the emotional actress/Scorpio/Italian that I am. All three of those things lend to someone who wants to wallow and heartbreak. In high school, I got broken up with by the love of my life at the time, and I became so depressed, I was writing all these Dave Matthews Band lyrics and leaving them on his doorstep for his parents to see. I’d walk past his car and press my face up to the glass to just see what was in his car. I had my own landline, and I’ll never forget it: I’m crying on the phone for the millionth time to him trying to get him to take me back, and my dad walks into the room and pulls the phone out of the wall — and I don’t mean the cord, I mean the entire thing. He was just like, “Get ahold of yourself.”

Parvati Shallow: I read this book called Bittersweet by Susan Cain, and it’s about how the power of sorrow and longing make us whole. It’s such a good book. It helped me through my divorce and getting through my custody split and missing my daughter. I was longing for her so much. And there is something to that sense of longing. It’s a creative force. Think about all the music that gets created out of that place of agonizing over loving someone who doesn’t love you back — “Jessie’s Girl”! Or Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own.”

Jake Shane: Sometimes crushes allow me to digest sad music better and appreciate that better, which is always fun. It’s like pressing a bruise, or like pressing your gums when they tingle a bit. Why does that feel kind of good?

Sasha Colby: I’m sure that’s why I’m drawn to crushes — for that inevitable sad girl moment that I’m used to. You’ve got to pick the scab.

Margaret Cho: When you get older and become more cynical, you just refuse to be tortured by a crush. I’m done with that part. So I just allow maybe the initial feelings of Oh, that person's attractive, and then I just let it be that.

How much of a crush is about them, and how much of it is about us?

Jake Shane: A crush is probably like 99.9% projection. They’ll probably give me like 0.1%. I sound like Penn Badgley from You.

Tinx: It’s like that saying, “Only unrequited love can be romantic.” The magic of a crush is that it’s quite dependent on your imagination. I find that people who are more creative get the craziest crushes. Have you ever been around your friend who’s nuts when they have a crush? I’m insufferable when I have a crush. I made my crush on Diplo a two-year bit, OK?

Hunter Harris: I feel like that’s why no one can ever have a crush on me — because I talk too much. I have no air of mystery, and that’s a pretty key part of a crush.

“I couldn’t stop texting this guy, so I took NyQuil at 4 p.m. and put myself to bed. It’s disturbing, but it worked.”

Margaret Cho: You imagine this other person to have all of these attributes that you wish for in somebody. Crushes are really just a call to the universe of the things that you want in a partner, the things that you want in somebody that’s going to be in your life.

Sasha Colby: Crushes are also a reflection of where you are at that moment in time. It’s a reflection of how you view yourself. If I look back on my crushes, they’re almost timestamps, like, “Oh yeah, I was pretty broken, which is why I was crushing on a douchebag.”

Haley Mlotek: You can experience really intense feelings based on quite limited interactions or limited information. Love has so much more to do with wanting to understand someone very deeply and completely, and wanting to be understood by them in the same way. That’s why it’s the more intense and adult version of it. [But both] feelings need each other very much. It’s hard to imagine getting to that place of love without some element of electricity.

Candace Bushnell: As a writer, if you want the reader to fall in love with a man, then make them up in your imagination — because that man does not exist in real life. That’s the reality. I am always going to try to write about men the way they really are. But if you want to write that romantic hero, you just have to make it up.

Do you act on your crushes? Are crushes always meant to be acted on?

Jisoo: Crushes are new, fun, and exciting, and you don’t have to take them very seriously. You can allow yourself to be silly and live in the moment at the beginning stages of a crush before all of the other feelings of love develop.

Sasha Colby: I feel crushes are in their own little lane. Living in LA, I have so many: a grocery store crush, a guy-at-the-bank crash. Just cuties where you’re like, “That’s my baby!” You make up like, “Oh, that’s my boyfriend!” Me and my friends do that all the time whenever we travel. It makes the time go by, especially in these dark times — who doesn't need to make up some wild stories?

Casey Wilson: I was so boy-crazy growing up, I would have a crush on every single person: taken, not taken, interested, not interested in me, never heard of me, dear friend — anyone. I think it goes without saying I have loved many a gay man. And, honestly, that knowledge never really stopped me from trying.

Jake Shane: I can’t have a crush if I don’t think anything is going to come from it. I’m so delusional. I will convince myself that it’s happening for me. I’m very 0 to a 100 — there are no stages. It explodes all at once, and that goes for anything in my life. I have OCD, so I really hyperfixate on things. I can fall in love with an idea and become very manic, and then I could wake up one day and be like, “Oh, nevermind.”

“A person can’t be a hobby. A crush can be a hobby, but a person is a person, and you have to treat them like a person.”

Haley Mlotek: I am an avoidant crusher. I’ll reward myself with an Instagram check if it’s been an appropriate length of time, or revisit a photo that’s saved on my phone. But I really am loath to text first. In the last few years I’ve developed this tendency of not saving their number in my phone. I don’t know why! I don’t think of it as a noncommittal thing, I think of it as maintaining the fantasy. If I don’t have a name in my phone, there’s still the element of mystery involved.

Tinx: For me, usually when I meet someone that I’m going to date, I like them right away. I’m like, they’re going to be my boyfriend. For me, a crush is always another category of guy, where it’s like: Maybe we have a little thing, maybe we don’t.

Casey McQuiston: Crushes are like satellites. You have this big, beautiful night sky and all of these stars, and then there’s this bright burst of light that passes through, and you're like, “Wow! How f*cking amazing to see you — but getting into the rocket ship to touch you is a whole different thing.” Sometimes what’s fun about a crush is that as long as you don't act on it, you can’t f*ck it up.

Tinx: I personally like to have really pie-in-the-sky crushes, because then you’re probably not going to have your bubble burst.

Can a crush be a form of imitation?

Casey McQuiston: The first crush I ever had on a girl, I was probably 15 and so far from understanding that it was a crush on a girl. But I did know that I was obsessed with looking at her MySpace page and listening to all of her favorite music that she listed and making it my favorite music so I would have something to talk to her about.

Jake Shane: If I like one thing about someone, then I'll convince myself I like everything about them. There was this guy who was into surfing, and I was like, “Oh my God, all I want to do is sit on the beach!” If one of my friends asked me to do that? Literally I wouldn’t want to do anything less. But in that moment, that’s all I wanted to do.

Sasha Colby: I started dancing because I was crushing on the guys and seeing all these cool queer people and wanting to be a part of that. A lot of motivation of going to dance class growing up was dance crushes. Crushes really helped my career later!

Casey McQuiston: I only crush on people who I want to be more like in some way. So many of my early queer crushes were on people who were really out, and I was really more crushing on their out-ness.

Parvati Shallow: There’s the aspirational crush, where you have this longing to expand this part of you, and when you see someone really exemplifying that, you’re like, “I want that.” There’s a part of us inside that knows we are destined for greatness. And then when we see someone exemplifying that in the category, it touches that part of us that knows we are destined for greatness.

Casey McQuiston: Sometimes a crush and gender envy are really hard to distinguish from each other. Do I want to be with you? Or do I just want to be you for a day and experience what it's like to move through the world as you? I will both crush on and envy the way that cis men can be feminine. If I could perform being feminine as a dude, that would be gender euphoria to me. I can have a crush on Jonathan Bailey and also understand that’s not really my lane. There is something about him that I would love to embody. I think we should have a conversation about the difference between embody and on my body.

Hunter Harris: Peyton Dix, my Lemme Say This podcast co-host, and I tease each other all the time because one of my biggest crushes is King Princess, the musician, but I’m totally straight. And Peyton is a lesbian and her biggest crush is The Rock. And it’s like some wires cross: Demographically, I should have a crush on The Rock, just being a straight woman, and yet I find him insufferable. And she should love King Princess, but I am off-book on every King Princess song.

Crushes don’t last forever — how do they usually end for you?

Haley Mlotek: Sometimes getting stuck in that limbo stage is the cure for a crush. A crush needs something to keep it going, and if you give it nothing, it does die out. You need to find the balance between a healthy amount of tension and anticipation without succumbing to inertia entirely.

Tinx: For me, the end of a crush is when reality is bigger than my imagination. So when I lose that balance, when I have more data to process than my imagination can deal with. I just watched The Substance and it’s exactly like that — you have to balance it.

Casey McQuiston: A person can’t be a hobby. A crush can be a hobby, but a person is a person, and you have to treat them like a person. Once you are at the level where you and this person are people to each other, we do have to take crush goggles off and have direct, honest adult conversations about our feelings, unfortunately.

Margaret Cho: Rarely does a crush actually match what you’ve created them to be. They either didn’t live up to this idealized image that I had in my head — that’s still a disappointment, it’s like buyer’s remorse — or they outperformed that image, and then they became a partner or a lover.

Tinx: For me, the ideal situation is: I have a crush on a guy, we have a fun little fling, and then he goes back into the ether. He’s out there, but it’s just a little bit more special. That’s one of the best things about life: You’ve have these experiences with someone, and they don’t last forever. But once in a while you’ll see something that reminds you of them, and it’s just nice to have shared that little moment.

Candace Bushnell: If two people are interested in each other and they’re attracted to each other, you kind of can’t mess it up unless the guy does something and the woman gets the ick, which I’ve been hearing a lot about on TikTok. Years ago, because women were so pushed into the idea of “You’ve got to have a relationship,” you got the ick — but you just had to get over the ick. Now, it’s so great. Young women, they’re like, “I have the ick, I’m not getting over it.”

Let’s hear some of those crush-ending icks!

Casey Wilson: If someone likes you back too much immediately, I think we’re repulsed by that.

Margaret Cho: Weird social hierarchy, like if they’re rude to wait staff. Weird political views. Tax evasion.

Hunter Harris: Dirt under your nails, that’s really nasty to me. If someone cuffs their jeans, it’s like, “OK, we’re shutting this down completely.” Or if I hear someone likes The Office.

Casey McQuiston: If I went over to your house and it was just a mattress on the floor. I’m 34 years old. I need a Tempur-Pedic mattress, I’m sorry.

What kinds of non-romantic crushes do you get?

Casey Wilson: I have felt the same feeling of a crush when I meet a new girlfriend. I have such long-term best friends from NYU that I’ve had for years and years and years, it’s almost like: “I’ve met all the soulmates I’m going to make from a friendship perspective.” But then I met this one mom friend and I’m like, “We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together as friends, parenting together.” I was struck by how much it resembled a real crush despite it not being sexual.

Casey McQuiston: I have a lot of culinary crushes. I have a lot of crushes on people who are chefs, and they inspire me to cook more of my own stuff and learn more about the kind of cooking that they do.

Parvati Shallow: I get mind crushes. If somebody has an interesting brain, I’m like, “Oh God, I want to sit with you and talk about aliens. I want to hear your opinions about where humans come from. Are we souls? Are we bodies? What are we?”

Margaret Cho: Aesthetic crushes are really where it’s at. I always have a crush on Todd Haynes films. I’m always interested in mid-century modern house tours in the Hollywood Hills. I just want to see what it looks like and what it would be like to live like that.

Can crushes co-exist with a committed relationship?

Haley Mlotek: When a crush first happens, it feels so spontaneous, and sometimes it’s so powerful that it’s unwelcome. The thrill of it is that it’s out of your hands. I think in a relationship, in order to sustain it, you have to deliberately engineer crush-provoking elements into the connection. And that’s sort of the antithesis of what we think of a crush as being. It is possible, but it looks different.

Parvati Shallow: It can be really hard for me to tell: Is this crush about the other person, or is it about me? Also, why do you even need to know, right? If you’re already in a relationship, you don’t actually need to know. But it still is fun to play with. We try to make meaning out of everything, and with a crush, you don’t have to.

Casey Wilson: When you hit a certain age and you’re like, “This is going to be my career, these are my kids, this is where I live,” there are so few question marks in our lives. They’re all answered. And I think if the questions are answered perfectly, it’s just fun to build out this Sliding Doors version of your life in your head.

Haley Mlotek: There’s a part of me that does think it’s a little bit inevitable in this life — not that you’ll develop a crush on another person while you’re in a relationship, but that you’ll be surprised by your own feelings without being able to anticipate them. I would never take this advice myself because I worry about things I can’t control, but theoretically, knowing that should release us from the fear and the guilt. It’s out of our hands.

What’s your best crush advice?

Jake Shane: Sometimes it’s painfully obvious what the answer is, and you’ve just got to take it and move on. You can’t use a crush as something to get you up and out of bed because then if you face rejection, you fall into a hole. It’s not worth it!

Casey Wilson: My sister-in-law has what she calls the lighthouse theory, which is about just staying a bit mysterious. Even with her own husband in the house, if he texts her, she won’t text back right away. And she never texts questions — texting a question leaves you vulnerable. It has an implication of desperation. I know those mind games are exhausting, but in hindsight, I wish I played more of them only to quell my own insecurity. I am a very forward person. I would just ask someone out. But then the day of, you’re going, “Did they really want to be here?” I just wish I would’ve known if there’d been more outward calls.

Candace Bushnell: Go on TikTok. There are all of these people on TikTok, men and women who have all kinds of dating advice. There’s the two-second look: You look at somebody for two seconds, then you look away. Then you look back, you catch their eye for five seconds, then you look away. And sure enough, they’ll come over. There’s some guy named Benny Hart. He’s always like, “He doesn’t call? He’s not interested. If he’s not asking you out? He’s not interested. You’re texting with him, he’s not asking you out? Not interested.” I can’t believe I even know about Benny, but I do. I’m like, Benny’s cute.

Casey Wilson: This the most mentally unstable piece of advice I could give: One time right after college, I really liked this guy and could not stop texting him. I could tell his communication was falling off, but I couldn’t stop. So I simply took NyQuil at about 4 p.m. and put myself to bed. I literally knocked myself out so that I could not text, because I would get really weak at night, especially if I had a drink. I mean, that’s disturbing. But it worked. I think there’s something that really sets people off when you simply do not respond to them.

Candace Bushnell: Women have a lot of fantasies about what men are really like, and from writing Sex and the City, I don’t have those fantasies. I’ve been trying to say to women for years: A relationship for you is number one. For a man, if you’re lucky, it’s four or five on his list.

Tinx: I have this manifestation tool called the crush list, which I talk about in my first book. I suggest that people write a crush list in their phone. It could be anyone: a cute person you see getting coffee, a celebrity. That is just saying to the universe, I am ready for fun, cute energy. I’ve always been a big champion of crushes, and I am hoping everyone has a crush-filled year. And also, crushes can happen at any age. I feel like a lot of people cut themselves off. Crushes are timeless, so indulge in one. It’ll make you happy.

Jisoo: I hope everyone feels comfortable and excited to explore their crushes, especially around Valentine’s Day! Crushes and love can come in so many various forms, and they are all beautiful. I was inspired by all of these various forms of love when creating my new mini album, AMORTAGE.

Sasha Colby: I mean, the world’s probably going to end soon — just go and ask your crush out! Enjoy the climb as much as the fall, because you’ll catch the next wave and you’ll have another crush, inevitably. That’s the beauty of it.

Reporting by Nolan Feeney, Hannah Kerns, Hannah Orenstein, Greta Rainbow, and Michelle Toglia. Interviews have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.