The Weight of Love: {Celebrity Crush}, Equal Parts Noun and Verb

That America’s divorce rate is so high probably has to do a lot with the poor foundations of our love. After all, what do you expect from a society that glorifies the idea of the celebrity crush? As children, we start off idolizing the famous from whom we’ve stripped all humanity. (Woe betide the Hollywood heartthrob who expresses an unpopular opinion, is caught on camera without makeup, or brushes with the law.)

We learn early on that admiring perfection from afar is par for the course, that love is so much glitter and makeup, pitch correction and branding.

See, it’s terribly simple to love when the width of your devotion is a doodle across the margins of your notebook. Posters in the bedroom are easy to pin up even if the feelings they’re supposed to represent are impossible to pin down. And the pedestals we hoist celebrities on aren’t challenging to carry when society helps hold them aloft.

But eventually fantasy gives way to the urges and needs of the flesh and the soul, so we lower our expectations and set our sights on those “celebrities” closer to home. To date our friends, our classmates, and our neighbors is to pick up their pillars that weigh heavily on our singular shoulders. We bow under the yoke of their unintentional lies, their casual disappointments and indifferent falsehoods, and the continuous insistence that the relationship be maintained.

Gone is the glitter of love, replaced with bruises and sweat. These pedestals break us—or else we drop them out of self-preservation—so we swear to learn, to grasp more firmly, to breathe more deeply, to pace ourselves for the next set.

Sometimes we rest between. Sometimes we charge unheedingly to another. Our goal is ever the pedestal: the thrill of a new partner, the glamour of novelty, and the excitement of abandoning responsibility. But lucky are the few who, when they decide they can’t support the burden of the pedestal, oh-so-gently set it down. Luckier still are the ones who are then helped down off their own: to enter a relationship as people—as partners—and not atop pedestals.

Hand in hand, these rare pairs rejoice, and bleed, and weep, and chance, and fight, and grow, and wither, and dance. For these few velveteen souls, they may even know actual love, trading their twin pedestals for headstones.

As for the rest, well, perhaps it’d be cruel to say they’re doomed to never truly figure out love. But cut them some slack—it’s not entirely their fault.

Celebrity crushes. Just not who you’d think.