On Being ‘In Like’ With Someone

It’s not love. At least, not yet. It could be, though. It’s a possibility. A probability? No idea.

It’s more than just friendship. In fact, in all likelihood, you haven’t known each other long enough or well enough to call each other good friends.

But there’s something that’s like closeness. And yet it’s not. It’s the joyful discovery of how much you have in common with them, when such discoveries are commonplace to the point of mundane with your actual friends.

There’s what just stops short of flirtation. The politeness and interest that you never experience with people who are close to you. But also the chilled-outness and relaxed vibe that you don’t usually enjoy with someone you’re flirting with. You look at the their face in a photograph that has other people in it and you say,

“This one’s nice. You..umm….look good.”

If you have common friends, you carefully fall silent with their name gets mentioned and feign nonchalance or indifference. When pushed, you say (quite truthfully) that you really don’t know that much about them.

Is it one-sided, you wonder. Is it even a thing, you start to think. And I’m here to say that it is. Hormones are responsible for the heightened moods you feel when you’re around them. That and if you, like me, enjoy conversations, the highs of shared ideas (and lows of boredom with other people, when they aren’t around). It’s the fascination of newness, the sheer entertainment of discovering the unknown. I wouldn’t call it lust, just yet. But it’s a glimmer of interest, a flicker of attraction, that could become more if fanned and nurtured just right. Chemistry and physics working out to make biology interesting.

It’s fun. It is the best thing about meeting new people, the possibility that you could fall in like with them. Enjoy it. The dangers of lust and the fearfulness of love come later.