Is It Cringe To Have A Crush As An Adult?

From overanalyzing text messages to romanticizing everyday encounters, here’s why crushes in your 20s and 30s are embarrassing, exciting, and completely worth having.

“Guess what I’m trying to say is, I’d rather die than be friends,” goes a line from NIKI’s song “Magnets.” It’s a lyric that kept looping in my head as I stared at a photo of a guy and me: his arm draped over my shoulder, both of us drunk, celebrating something, smiling, and leaning toward each other. It’s been a week since that night, and I’m almost ashamed to admit that I have a crush on him. Saying I have a crush outside the safety of a group chat feels strange. The last time I had one was in college—when I had no real responsibilities, no access to adult money, and far more time to swoon over someone. Having a crush in your youth feels like a rite of passage. In adulthood, however, giggling because a specific person smiled at you feels like a form of psychological regression. Which leads me to the question: Is having a crush as an adult cringe?

The shorter, less vulnerable, knee-jerk answer is: yes, it can be. But that’s exactly why we need crushes in our 20s and 30s. Daily life is constantly streamlined for maximum efficiency, drained of all the color that comes with human emotion; having a crush is a beautiful albeit chaotic break from the humdrum. Let me explain.

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How An Adult Crush Is Just Like Any Other Crush

Developing an “adult crush” isn’t much different from developing one when you’re younger, except it comes with a life of increased responsibility and a longer list of commitments. More often than not, it’s not a dramatic, sweeping meet-cute. From personal experience and anecdotes I’ve picked up, it’s an accumulation of smaller mundane moments: the 30 minutes before a law school professor arrives, a lunch break at work, or a few quiet moments waiting in line at the grocery store. In these brief pauses, life slows down just enough for you to notice the people around you. One moment, it’s business as usual, then the next, it’s not—and there they are.

In a very Edward-and-Bella kind of way, everything seems to move in slow motion. Their laugh cuts through the noise of the room. You find yourself remembering insignificant details about them with alarming precision. You become strangely attuned to their routines, knowing exactly when they make their afternoon coffee run. You notice their communication style, their mannerisms, and the way they react under pressure. In the guise of being observant, you’re quietly collecting details about them. The ordinary suddenly feels too magnified to even put into words.

Then comes the lore-building stage. This is where the brain goes rogue: armed with roughly 45 seconds of conversation, you begin filling in the blanks of their entire personality. They wear cool sneakers? They probably spend weekends watching indie films. They bring home-cooked lunches? They’re stable and family-oriented. They mention liking a particular book once? You’ve decided they possess a rich inner life and impeccable taste. At this point, you’re not crushing on a real person yet; you’re crushing on a version of them you’ve partially invented or co-authored.

Then comes denial. It’s the phase that begins the moment your heart does a tiny somersault after seeing their name pop up on your screen. Naturally, you attempt to rationalize it. Maybe you tell yourself, “I don’t have a crush. I just respect their work ethic” or “I simply enjoy our conversations.”  You convince yourself that what you’re feeling is professional respect, intellectual admiration, or some other emotionally sophisticated and “logical” explanation. Anything but a crush.

But the truth becomes difficult to ignore. The exact moment a crush becomes official (I’m making an amusing but commonly experienced generalization, of course, since there are many ways you can come to this realization) is when you spend ten minutes rewriting a casual text message because “Sounds good!” feels too enthusiastic, while “Sounds good” reads like an emotional eviction notice. Again, what we’d normally consider inconsequential or everyday becomes bigger, more unwieldy, and terrifyingly significant.

Why Developing An Adult Crush Feels Cringe

The embarrassing thing about having a crush as an adult is that it completely disrupts the image you’ve worked so hard to build for yourself. You’re supposed to be composed, more mature. You have deadlines to meet, bills to pay, and emails to answer; you don’t have time for butterflies in the stomach or re-reading texts. Yet here you are, letting one person derail your entire train of thought after simply viewing or reacting to your Instagram Story, or giving you a wry smile with a sideways glance.

A crush turns intelligent adults into babbling babies, and secure people into full-blown over-thinkers and detectives. One minute you’re minding your own business, the next you’re scrolling through years of social media posts trying to figure out where they spent their college years, or whether that photo dump was taken in Siargao or Elyu; the fear of accidentally liking a photo from 2022 becomes a very real threat. “Get a grip,” you tell yourself, over and over again, “You’re a grown up, why are you fawning over someone when you’ve got a million other things to attend to?”

A crush has no strategy, no roadmap, no measurable outcome. It gives you a cloyingly sweet shot of joy, but the more practical side of your brain will label it “useless” in the grand scheme of adult life, unless you’re planning to actually pursue a serious relationship with the person (which is an entirely different, weighty matter altogether).

In Defense Of Adults Who Have Crushes

A crush, at any age, isn’t inherently cringe. It becomes “cringe” precisely because of the labels, expectations, and perspectives we impose on ourselves. It’s the anti-thesis to a culture that demands practicality and rationality at a certain age. The thing is, emotions don’t have an expiry date. They’ll always exist for as long as we continue to forge relationships with other people, whatever shapes these may take. Yes, our maturity should be reflected in how we manage, communicate, and act on these feelings, but it’s not like we have any control over catching them. They’re as normal, and arguably necessary, as any other bodily function.

In a lighthearted way, I think we need crushes. Life can become painfully predictable: wake up, work, commute, sleep, repeat. A crush adds a little plot to an otherwise ordinary week. Mundane moments become something to look forward to (in the case of a workplace or school crush, clocking in or attending class feels slightly less tragic when there’s a chance you’ll see them even for a few minutes).

A crush also wakes something up inside you. You start caring about what you wear again; you revisit songs that make your heart ache in a good way; you notice the finer details of life you might’ve overlooked in favor of something more clinical; you romanticize everything, from your walks home to the way the sky looked when you were with them.

Crushes don’t come with the guarantee of becoming a love story or committed relationship, but that’s not really the point. For a certain time, someone makes your day a little brighter. A crush softens you; it reminds you of your capacity to feel and be touched by another life. It permits you to be excited, hopeful, and slightly ridiculous. Amid the exhaustingly robotic realities of adulthood, it’s an affirming reminder of your humanity, and that’s something worth holding onto.