Decoding the Friend Crush

I noticed her right away. She was sitting next to me in our first-year biology class with a ratty notebook filled with loose-leaf paper and a yellow Papermate Sharpwriter pencil, the kind with the red eraser built into the top. We were learning about the structure of leaves and her sheet of paper was filled with perfect replicas of leaves, delicately shaded undersides, vivid cross-sections with neatly labeled parts, and in the margins of her paper, doodles of female faces with big eyes and crazy hairstyles.

She was wearing an unwarranted amount of clothing for that hot August day in Iowa: a pair of colorful pants, a batik wrap skirt, a bright tank top over another t-shirt, rings on every finger, one chunky stone necklace and one long skinny gold one. Her hair was long and braided into two pigtails that made her hawkish nose seem more prominent on her long face. In my jeans and navy blue Gap t-shirt, I looked like I was trying to blend into a suburban high school, the very environment I had just left. Where had she grown up, I thought, that she dressed liked that?

Two weeks later, we were partners for an ecology lab at a field station in the middle of the Iowa prairie. We had been told to dress in old clothes for the day. I had dutifully put on hiking boots, a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee, a white t-shirt with my high school mascot in burgundy and green, and knotted a burgundy and green plaid flannel shirt around my waist, just in case. She came down to get me in my dorm room from hers one floor above and stared at me. “Those are your old clothes?” she asked, incredulous.

I stared back at her. “Those are yours?” I asked. She was wearing a pair of paint-smeared, baggy, polyester pants that had worn thin in the seat and knees revealing patches of lighter fabric that showed the white lining underneath. Her t-shirt was also covered with paint splotches and filled with holes: the one under her right arm was so big it revealed the dingy blue tank top she was wearing underneath. She was carrying an old sweater that had moth-eaten holes in the armpits.

The only article of clothing we had in common was our hiking boots.

She was from Philadelphia, the city proper, instead of a quiet suburb of Denver, like me. I thought she was bizarre and crazy and urban and fun and brand new. She thought I was strange and well-adjusted and suburban and fun and brand new. We went out to parties together, giggled our way to kegs, bumped on makeshift dance floors, and walked to the gas station in the middle of town to buy frozen pizza at the end of the night. We ate meals in the dining hall together and talked late at night in our rooms, sharing hot chocolate and cookies and stories about our lives. We couldn’t get enough of each other.

It would be later that I would learn the term for what she and I had: friend crush.

Friend crushes, I’ve learned, are not unique to girls. Male friends have agreed the feeling is genderless: you want to be around your friend crush all the time. You never get sick of their company. You are each other’s go-to for advice and fun and a random Tuesday night outing to the movies. You spend your weekends together. You stop feeling so alone in the world.

Eventually, though, the friend crush fades, leaving behind a friendship whose strength you must now test with a more jaded view of your friend, without your intoxicating-yet-often-misleading first impressions. For us, the fabric of our friendship disintegrated after college, slowly at first so we didn’t really notice the tears, finally culminating in an explosive fight that left it ripped and tattered.

We didn’t talk for a year after that fight and have only talked a handful of times since then.

Now, three and a half years later, I am sitting here at my “grown-up” job thinking of her. I am getting married next year to a man she has never met. I live in an apartment she has never seen. I have gone back to school and finished a master’s degree in the time we’ve been apart. I have no idea what changes and successes she’s had in the last few years.

I can’t help but wonder if I’ll ever feel that way about a friend again. I have had friend crushes since her, but none as strong, as evidenced by the fact that I have stayed friends or acquaintances with the others. Will anyone ever be as intoxicating and as life-changing? Do we outgrow that type of friendship as we get older in same way we outgrew playing pretend and dressing our Barbies?