Disclaimer: I’m one of the most monogamously minded people you will ever meet.
Do you remember your first crush?
Do you even know what a crush really is?
Urban Dictionary states that a crush “is a burning desire to be with someone you find very attractive and extremely special.” The word “attractive” has an obvious physical connotation, but for me, personality has always been way more important than appearance.
I had my first crush when I was in Junior High… It was one of my cast mates in the school play. It happened to be a boy. I didn’t dare say anything about it to anyone. In a more accepting world, we might have had the chance of being high school sweethearts.
Years after graduation, we bumped in to each other online in the early days of social media. We both came out to each other. He lived in a different state. We were both seeing other people at the time… We’ve shared war stories ever since.
He was my first crush and I never felt comfortable telling him… If he reads this, he’s probably going to be surprised… or maybe not. I consider him one of my closest friends today, even though we live a great distance apart.
So what’s the point??? Well, I just realized something from my latest relationship… It was with a “bisexual” and it never occurred to me that it could be acceptable until I met him. Society forces us to choose a label, especially when a boy’s first crush happens to be on another boy.
Are labels really so important when their stigmas are physically causing so many questioning youth to commit suicide? Because my first crush happened to be a boy, I listened to society and I branded myself as gay. I never went to prom because I didn’t want to feel like I was deceiving anyone… I didn’t have my first real kiss until I was 20 years old.
I dream of an accepting society where I could have gone back to Junior High and told my parents and friends that I had a crush on a boy or a girl… I dream of a world where the most common response is to choose the one who makes us smile the most.
Please don’t twist my words to say that I think people can or should change their preferences. Through my experience as a “gold star gay”, without a doubt, I do believe that certain people are genetically driven to one sex or the other…. But if I believe that, then I have to believe that it’s genetically possible to have an equal attraction to both or neither gender.
In my mind, from everything I’ve learned about love, attraction of the mind is so much more important than which body parts happen to be where. I’m single right now, and I’m not going to jump in to another relationship until I’m 100% happy being myself… I simply don’t plan on restricting my attraction to gender. Whether I’m with a man or a woman, I hope my friends will support me no matter who it happens to be. My decisions on attraction will now be driven by how much I smile and how much we make each other smile. No matter who you are, I’ll grant you the same respect.
So from now on, the only forced label I’m going to answer to is “Human.”
Imagine what it might be like if more people stopped judging others and shared more compassion… What if? Would it really be all that bad?
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