Christine Détrez is professor of sociology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and directs the Max Weber Center. Her research focuses on issues of gender and culture. She notably published Our mothers. Huguette, Christiane and so many others, a story of female emancipation (La Découverte, 2020) and To look like you (novel, Denoël, 2021).
Today, we hear a lot of teenagers talking about “crush”. What does this term cover exactly?
A crush, to put it simply, would be an attraction for someone who wants to remain secret. In the same way that we can talk about a culture of flirting in the 1960s, we can talk about a culture of crushes today. Starting from this word seemed to me a good gateway to questioning young people. It’s easier than asking general questions about love and friendship.
If attraction is intended to “remain” secret, does that mean that the crush remains a romance without taking action?
If you are a crush purist, yes, it should not be consumed, especially when you are in middle and high school. Moreover, the young people I interviewed say that once it becomes a reality, it’s no longer a crush. It becomes a “lease”, a partner, a boyfriend, a girlfriend. On the other hand, young adults may have concrete stories with a person whom they continue to consider as their crush.
So would there be crush and crush?
It’s a bit of a portmanteau word, which, in fact, covers several categories. The one where we never expect reciprocity is the celebrity crush. The crush for the actor Timothée Chalamet, for example. There is little chance that one day we will get a sign of reciprocity from this person. It can also be someone you see passing by in a subway, who you crush on, but who you will never approach. So, there is a certain category of crush that remains completely virtual. But there are others, especially in high school, whose aim is more to fuel laughter and discussion with friends. “I wasn’t sure if I had a crush, then my friends told me it was, so it became a crush,” one young girl told me. We learn collectively to decode the signs of attraction; somewhere, we learn to love.
A love without reciprocity?
There, there is a whole series of strategies aimed at finding out if it is reciprocal. For example: “Did he look at me? » In the end, sometimes you just say “hello” in a brief and embarrassed way to your crush in the canteen, and it doesn’t go further than that.
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