For the first time since I was old enough to understand the intoxicating thrill of infatuation, I do not have a crush. Not a single fixation, not even a passing maybe-if-we-both-got-drunk-at-the-same-time attraction. No brooding, semi-platonic obsession with an unattainable older man. No intellectual pining over an emotionally stunted guy who quotes Barthes out of context. Nothing. The part of my brain that once operated like a rotating art gallery of male projections—carefully curated, obsessively maintained—has gone dark.
The sheer mental space that has freed up is both exhilarating and slightly concerning.
My entire adolescence was structured around the architecture of desire: who I liked, how much I liked them, and the aesthetic suffering that came with it. If I was in love, or even adjacent to love, I had a purpose. If I wasn’t, I found someone to fixate on, sculpting them into something worth my obsession. It didn’t matter if they were worthy in reality. The projection was what mattered.
Then, three weeks after my ex broke up with me, I kissed someone else. It wasn’t a meaningful kiss, not even a particularly good one, but it was a symbolic one. An act of reclamation, or at least that’s what I told myself—until my ex found out and sent me a slew of messages insinuating I was a whore. And in that moment seven months ago, something in me snapped, but not in the way you’d expect. Not in the way where I felt guilt or shame, but in a way where I realized, with terrifying clarity, how much of my energy had been wasted on men who genuinely believed they had ownership over my body, my desires, my emotional labor. It was as if my entire nervous system rejected the idea of romance in a single instant. I didn’t decide to become celibate; my body simply exorcized its capacity for male validation.
At first, this felt revolutionary. In a world that insists on women’s desirability as their primary currency, choosing not to desire at all is a kind of rebellion. Imagine how much time I’d wasted thinking about men—replaying conversations, analyzing text messages like sacred scripture, no longer eroding myself for the sake of being wanted. All that energy, reclaimed. My brain felt lighter. My skin cleared. My attention span improved. I started reading entire books without the distraction of wondering whether someone was going to text me back. I had transcended.
And yet, despite the clarity, the reclaimed bandwidth, the overwhelming relief, there is something slightly unnerving about the sudden absence of desire. I sometimes catch myself thinking, what the fuck do I even think about now? Crushes, for all their agony, were at least a structured distraction. Without them, my mind is terrifyingly quiet.
Now, I just… go to class. Do my work. Make plans. Go to yoga class. I live my life completely unbothered, and it’s amazing, but also unnerving in the way that total peace can be.
And yet, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Maybe this is what adulthood is—realizing that being obsessed with some man-child who texts in lowercase will not, in fact, save you. Maybe this is a permanent shift. Or maybe, one day, I’ll see some guy smoking outside a café reading The Man Without Qualities and spiral back into my old ways. Either way, it’s out of my hands now.
spring break 