Anatomy of a Crush

It was all so exciting that I had to run home and immediately start making phone calls.

"Hello," said LynnAnn.

"I can't believe it!" I said. "He definitely, definitely, definitely has a yen for me. How cool is this? You know how I never think anybody is even marginally attracted to me? That I am clearly repugnant? But let me tell you. Prunella vomited in the car and Charlie cleaned it up for me. He's crazy about me."

LynnAnn started giggling. She knew Charlie, she knew me, she knew Prunella, my dog. She's been worried about me ever since my marriage ended and I declared myself closed for renovations. So of course my ecstatic blathering would cheer her. But it wasn't only that.

She was catching the crush vibe. A crush is a powerful thing. A crush, once activated, cannot be denied: It sweeps up everything in its wake; it becomes an emotional juggernaut.

I drove around in an all-day haze thinking, Charlie, oh Charlie. My radio played I Melt With You. At stoplights I bestowed blazing smiles on other drivers to the point where one guy got out of his car. Even Beverly Hills, a neighborhood slippery from catering to the scum of the earth, delighted me hugely. Because Charlie liked me.

Who is this paragon known as Charlie, you wonder? Oh hell, some guy. A friend of a friend. I see him at social events. At the last one he called me honey and gave me a one-armed hug and I thought, Whoa, maybe he likes me. But the crush switch wasn't tripped until the day I arrived at a gallery opening whining about my carsick dog and Charlie found some paper towels.

I called my son, I called my shrink, I called seven of my closest friends. I couldn't stop calling. I felt like I was having a drug rush: My vision was suffused with sunlight (though it was raining), my groin seemed to be oddly pulsing, Prunella tried to hump my leg.

I knew I was on a nutty roller-coaster ride yet I forgot about what happens when you reach the summit.

That night I went into a fever of obsession. I would get Charlie a present.

"The least I could do, after you cleaned up the vomit," I would say to him. When would I give it to him? Should I go to his house? Call? And what would this present be? Edible underwear? No, premature. Not yet. Save the edible underwear for another day. A photo! Charlie likes art (which I found out when I asked around obsessively). I dug maniacally through my photo library and found a picture of a dog with an ice pack on its head! Perfect!

Meanwhile, in some quiet academic office somewhere in the American Museum of Natural History, Helen Fisher, anthropologist, was quietly researching my plight. She studies data on the human reptilian brain. This is the ancient, scary part of the brain that remembers back millions of years, remembers the first cellular split of the first amoeba. And, believe me, it hasn't listened to a thing since then.

It's the reptilian brain that makes us chase each other around the watercooler. Not that it will ever tell us. Our reptilian brains quietly but firmly send their biological imperatives to our limbic systems and hypothalamuses, forcing us to behave like the wild animals we really are, and then leave it to our poor, beleaguered cortexes to make up some lame rationalization.

According to the hypotheses of Fisher and many other really smart people, the reptilian brain, unable to dial a telephone, communicates through chemicals. It sends its messages via phenylethylamine, a brain substance that spreads feelings like elation and euphoria all along our neural pathways. PEA, natural speed, sends the brain into overdrive and keeps us babbling and obsessing into the night.

Then there's the luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone produced by the sexcrazed hypothalamus. LHRH sends other hormones to stimulate still other hormones that go straight to our genitals and then back up to our brains to tell us we're in love.

This is so not fair. My cortex was shouting at me "Charlie Charlie Charlie Chuck Charlie" at every possible opportunity. I felt like I could not live without this dude. After I wrapped the picture of the dog with the ice pack in blue shiny paper, I obsessed about whether Charlie likes blue, or shiny or paper!

Even though I hardly knew who Charlie was or why he's unafraid of vomit, he had become the man of my dreams! This is insane! It's something our bodies do so that the species will be fruitful and multiply. Has the reptilian brain taken a look at the world lately? Has it noticed any raptors at all? Why won't it notice all those strip malls and car dealerships and leave me the hell alone?

The next day I found out that Charlie was going over to a mutual friend's house to watch a baseball game. I thought I might pop in. As if on the wings of a dove I rushed over to this event, gripping my shiny package and presenting it to Charlie with a blush, a giggle and my carefully rehearsed off-the-cuff little speech. Charlie was watching his baseball game. I was wearing makeup applied to look like no makeup and a fluffy angora sweater.

Charlie saw me handing him a present and got the famous deer-caught-in-headlights look. He attempted to smile. "How nice of you! Really!" he enthused.

The death knell of the crush. The roller coaster plunged back down to earth. My world collapsed. I was listless, devastated, inconsolable, saw no reason to live. For a day. Then I forgot all about it.

The scientists say that people with hypopituitarism have none of these dizzying highs and lows of infatuations. That they don't even get crushes. It's something to look into.