THEY CALL IT PUPPY LOVE

“And they called it puppy love
Oh, I guess they’ll never know
How a young heart really feels
And why I love her so.”

“Puppy Love, Donny Osmond”

I’ve always disagreed with the term puppy love. It’s a word I feel has been grossly misdiagnosed. Most people associate it with the infatuations of being a teenager in what-you-think-is-love. The feelings you have at your first flush of adolescence, which arrives with its own set of blushing hormones.  Puppy love is one of those rites of passages that is said to mark our entry into adulthood. Probably because its outcome is never the one that you want. Somehow not getting what you want, transmutes you into being an adult.

But puppy love to me is not that young, infatuation love. It is the love you melt into after you’ve been with someone for a while. It’s a gooey comfortableness of affection you feel when your person makes you toast and tea in a thermos to take with you to work, because you were too busy playing hard to get with your snooze button to have breakfast.

I guess they call it puppy love, because a puppy is cuteness and hearts and rainbows, and all the things they think you draw on your school folder while daydreaming in Math’s class. It is soft and fluttery and not really there. Which is why calling your first crush ‘puppy’ love, is a condescension that irks me. My first crush was violent. Which is why I use the word crush to describe it.

I was always a late bloomer, and I went to an all girl’s high school, so my first crush happened to me at my first year of university. He used to work at the coffee cart at the quad, where everyone hung out to scope and stalk but pretend not to. He was what I never knew my perfect boy at the time would look like, until I saw him and knew. A shaved head, a knowing gait and a predilection for spacies. My friends would text me when he’d be at the cart, and I would miss lectures to sit there watching him. I’d hold two dollars in my hand, trying to get up the nerve to ask him for a flat white. The two dollars would end up as a sweaty talisman, that even if I had worked up enough courage, I wouldn’t dare hand over to him. And then his shift would be over.

He had a girlfriend who was blonde and had a dimple and looked exactly not like me. Because of my sweaty palms and the dimple, most of my crushing with this boy happened in my head. I imagined his voice to be gravely from all the cigarettes he smoked. I imagined dinners and notes and kisses and jokes. Sometimes if he walked past me I would blush at all that we’d been through that he didn’t know about. My head ballooned of him.

And then one day I got to meet him. A friend of a friend introduced me. He looked at me and said ‘hey’. And suddenly, my balloon popped. His voice wasn’t the voice I had heard him charm me with. It was too high, not the right tenor, as if he didn’t smoke at all. He wasn’t the person I held in my balloon.

I was half devastated, half relieved. Devastated because the crush was over, and it had all been so much fun. What would I balloon about now? Relieved because he nor I would have to live up to the relationship we’d just lived.

And although my imaginations may seem immature for a girl of nineteen, sometimes the things adults do in love, seem just as irrational. I know, I’ve done them. And sometimes the best relationships you have, are the ones in your head.

Meet Shana here! 

Illustration by Amber Ehler.