'Why Can't I Cease Thinking About My Loftier School Crush?'

Photo-Illustration: James Gallagher

Dear Therapist,

My married man and I have been happily married for 15 years, although we dated for about five years earlier getting married. Nosotros met in graduate school and have, in essence, been together our entire adult lives. Nosotros also have two picayune kids.

My life and my marriage are really great. We both piece of work in an intellectually stimulating and high-paying profession. My husband is a truly equal partner. He is a smart, funny, loving man and an engaged begetter. I love spending time with him. Our sex life has been dull at times, but we have worked together to spice things upwards in the terminal year. I truly have no "big ticket" complaints about my husband. He is my partner, my person.

Then why have I been unable to end thinking about a guy from high schoolhouse for the final year? High school guy (HSG) and I have a somewhat tortured history, which is probably why he tin can so easily monopolize my thoughts. I had a huge crush on him junior yr. He always seemed interested and so would pull back as soon as things started heating up between us. He wound upward dating another daughter most of junior year, and I moved on with another guy. Senior year we were both single and ended upwardly in this wheel where nosotros would be intimate (only no sex activity!), then HSG would ignore me, then nosotros would start flirting with each other, and and then we would hook up again. Information technology was maddening at the time (and actually still is when I think about it).

Anyway, after high school, I didn't really call back most HSG all that much. I dated a few guys in higher. HSG met his married woman in college and got engaged shortly earlier higher graduation. Everything between me and HSG seemed to be over. Then, one night, after nosotros had graduated from college — when HSG was engaged and I had just started dating my husband — HSG and I were both out at a bar with high-school friends. He followed me back to my house, confessed that he had always been in honey with me, and nosotros slept together. And, that was information technology. HSG married his fiancée. They had kids and are nevertheless married. I married my husband, had kids, and am still married.

HSG lives i neighborhood over from me. I ran into him in a store about a twelvemonth ago. We both had our kids with united states. Our kids weren't really letting the states conversation, then we exchanged emails to prepare a coffee date, which involved catching upward and a bit of reminiscing but was entirely candid. We hugged at the end and went our separate ways. We haven't been in contact since, merely HSG hasn't left my mind.

To be clear, I love my hubby very much and cannot imagine my life without him. But I take been having a lot of sexual thoughts almost HSG since we caught up. I'chiliad left wondering, how practise I deal with these thoughts? What practise they mean? Is this just a mutual stage that occurs in a marriage afterward getting through the nearly intense of the early-childhood years?

Stuck in High School

Dear Stuck in High School,

Let's first with the part of your story when High Schoolhouse Guy declares —while engaged to his time to come married woman — that he'd "always been in love" with you lot. I imagine what may have gone through your mind at that moment was, "Ah, finally!" Subsequently all the earlier back-and-forth, all the non knowing where you stood, all the wondering how he felt about you — he revealed his true feelings, the feelings that, at least in high school, you lot and so longed to hear.

What results from this bold revelation? Does he suspension off his engagement and brainstorm dating you to see if you're truly a lucifer? Does he explicate why, despite his always having been in love with you, he "ignored" you after each high-school hookup? Does he clarify why he proposed to another woman while in love with you? In other words, does he finally bear witness up, adult to adult, after this profession of love?

Well, no.

Instead, you have sex and function means. And so, years afterward, you have coffee with him, and … nothing happens. And once again, you're left holding a handbag of unfinished concern.

It seems that three things are getting tangled up for you lot, SIHS:  desire, unrequited love, and familiarity.

Well-nigh people in committed relationships have all sorts of extracurricular desires and fantasize about other people. Frequently these fantasies reconnect united states of america with aspects of ourselves that take been tamped downward past the daily demands of work, kids, and our partner's needs (the fantasy partner doesn't take inconvenient needs). Our fantasies safely and temporarily ship the states to a identify that nosotros want to visit for a thrill only not inhabit full-time. They stoke the intense desire that comes from mystery, altitude, and lack of attainment. In these ways, fantasies provide a magical space to play in a different context from the real-life playground of relationships or spousal relationship. In other words, fantasies themselves aren't problematic; they're simply a manifestation of normal want.

But your fantasies about High School Guy are somewhat complicated, SIHS, considering of your history together, which looks similar to a romantic comedy simply with a unlike catastrophe. In fact, in that location'southward a biological underpinning to the arc of romantic comedies, which are structured and so that ii people almost get together, just don't, until the terminal minutes of the movie (and so the moving picture ends). Studies from the anthropologist Helen Fisher show that the longer we expect to fulfill our desire, the higher the levels of dopamine — a neurotransmitter associated with "pleasure" — in our brains. It's no wonder that though the push-pull of non knowing where we stand can be "maddening," information technology likewise has the potential to thrill.

I don't hear you saying that you lot couldn't stop thinking near High School Guy after he confessed his love and y'all had sexual practice many years ago, and that's likely because one time we finally become what we've been yearning for, the fantasy ends, or at least subsides (unless the "beloved" was of a deeper, more grounded sort). Simply now High School Guy reappears, and the cycle repeats. You lot wonder: Has he been thinking virtually me all this time? Does he nevertheless love me? Desire me? Existence desired stokes want — and for women especially, another's want has been shown to be a stiff aphrodisiac. So you meet for coffee hopped up on dopamine and and then … some other intermission. High Schoolhouse Guy hasn't left your listen because you lot're forced to agree off once more — and given that he hasn't fabricated a move for further contact, you accept no idea when or if you'll encounter him again. That's a lot of dopamine coursing through your system.

I don't think that this push-pull dynamic is all his doing, though. I'yard curious to know what happened on your end whenever you got close to each other. In high school, did y'all inquire him straight what was going on when he would withdraw later on hooking upwardly? When you slept together after college, did you talk about what it meant — or didn't mean — for both of you? Did you share how you felt — and detect out how he felt — well-nigh the relationships you were both in? When he said that he had ever loved you, did y'all gain an agreement of why he never reached out to tell you this before? Did you talk well-nigh what you wanted from each other going forwards — friendship, more, less? When you had coffee together final year, did you ask what happened for him after his profession of love?

Sometimes we firmly believe it'due south the other person who's being disruptive, but actually nosotros're colluding in the confusion, because remaining in a state of confusion serves us. The downside of against High School Guy, of clarifying the situation, is that your fantasy would stop in a definitive way. Either you lot'd both remove the barriers and exam out a possible human relationship (if y'all actually "had" him, it's likely you'd think almost him less), or you'd make up one's mind non to, and the chimera would burst. Either way, the fantasy phase would end, then would the intoxicating desire surrounding it. And that boundless desire tin be hard to allow get of. How prissy, on the other hand, to take an exciting place to go, even if but in your mind? How useful (albeit agonizing) this confused state can be.

But at that place's a hitch. In keeping the fantasy alive and nowadays, yous miss out on the bodily nowadays.  With the fantasy front and center, the unlived life becomes the prize.  Non that you intend to go out your married man or he his wife. But you might be spending more than free energy on the life you don't have than on the ane y'all do, the one you know. You might be neglecting the life that's less confusing, but more familiar.

Familiarity gets a bad rap ("familiarity breeds contempt") but what brings on contempt or boredom or indifference often isn't our familiarity with our spouse — it'due south our familiarity with ourselves. Nosotros have go tedious to ourselves. We haven't made an effort to keep ourselves interesting. Nosotros haven't washed much to grow into our next life stage. We accept let go of our passion, curiosity, and vitality. Nosotros accept become utterly predictable.

Distraction — and that's what High School Guy is — takes root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it. Your life may indeed be great in all the ways that you lot describe. Just something is calling out to y'all that'due south more about you than it is about High School Guy.

What are yous distracting yourself from feeling? What do you need to resolve? Because high school is such a formative fourth dimension in our lives, our last leg on the journey from child to adult, sometimes those experiences become lodged and then tightly in our psyche that years or even decades later we still carry them around. It could be that this excessive focus on High School Guy ways that once and for all, you demand to put to residual the need to show your worth to High School Guy; it might exist a signal that information technology's fourth dimension to concede the battle rather than continue to wage it, and and then grieve this loss and all it represents (remnants of your youth?). Or it could be that these thoughts are a clue as to how you lot may or may non be showing up in your marriage. Maybe the part of familiarity that you lot're trying to escape isn't your familiarity with your married man, but your husband's familiarity with you and who you accept or oasis't become as you lot approach middle age. With High School Guy always at a comfortably uncomfortable distance, you lot can't ever become familiar to him, and therefore he'll never run across the parts of you that you lot similar least, the ones your husband sees. Sometimes the real fear of familiarity is that somebody becomes familiar with usa.

With couples in my part, I find that once they wait inward, rather than at something elusive "out there," familiarity breeds content, not contempt. Information technology brings connection, curiosity, and a want for discovery. Of class, you'll notwithstanding fantasize nigh the less familiar — and that'due south a practiced thing — just those fantasies won't feel intrusive. Instead they'll be a place to dream, not obsess.

Lori Gottlieb is a author  and a psychotherapist  in private practice. Got a question? Email therapist@nymag.com . Her column will appear hither every Friday .

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'Why Can't I Terminate Thinking About My High School Crush?'