this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Not a rare thing, really. It's a human issue, regardless of age or gender.
People can definitely get attracted to the idea of a person that lives in their heads. They fall for a fantasy, often nurturing it with daydream. That's what a 'crush' is.
Reality hits when you see them as a real person with nuanced emotions, deep personal history, and a rich inner world. The reality of a person clashes with the fantasy of them.
Often that's a good thing. People get relationship maturity that way. They grow their skills of empathy, patience, compassion. The fantasy fades for a beautiful tapestry. Even if your relationship ends, you can respect each other.
Sometimes it's an inconvenient truth. The reality of a person isn't what you want, and the fantasy of them withers in the face of it. You can even bitterly resent them for falling short of your daydreams, robbing you of their comfort.
As strange as it sounds, it is a blessing for it to happen so quickly. For many, it's something they awake to in middle age. Feeling encroaching mortality, they realise that they settled in a life that was convenient, with a partner that was attainable, rather than either being truly satisfying.
So they sabotage it, flee it, resent it, or all the above. We call it the 'mid-life crisis'.
This sucks and feels awful, but of the many ways this could've gone? This was actually one of the better ones.
What reality are you living in? The one I live in my fantasy of them is this person, but the reality of them is have are shallow, petty, person with the inner complexity of a Disney plot, who thinks nuanced emotion makes you gay and the only personal history they want to know are how many 0s are in your bank account while they tell you their sob story about how daddy didn't love them enough and their life should be 'so much more'.
That one.
In a fantasy, your crush is perfect. In reality, they're messy, traumatised, vulnerable, reactive etc. That's nuance. That's history. We're so immersed in our own fundamental ideas from upbringing that it's easy to assume we're the default, but not a single one of us are.
Sometimes that nuance is beautiful. Sometimes you're compatible.
Usually, it's a let-down. Because nobody can be a better match for you than the fantasy in your own head, and we need to learn to stop using daydreams as a yardstick.
Growth comes from accepting people are nuanced and determining what is compatible for you, instead o chasing the daydream (or pressuring a person to change into one).
..so the baggage there is that they're grown up in an environment that measured their worth as a person by their stoicism, particularly gender perscriptivism. They parrot 'emotions are gay' to conform to the standards imposed on them, even though it comes packaged with self-neglect and deep emotional trauma. They learned it young enough, imposed harshly enough, that they believe this is an immutable fact about the world.
See? Nuance.
No. I'm a man dating woman who constantly gets told I'm a gay homo for having emotions or having any nuance or subtley in my opinions and judgements.
like a lot of the comments on lemmy that tell me i'm a fascist because i think there is any nuance to political issues.