Crush
That feeling you used to have, that you were in love. Nice feeling, when your crush looked at you or smiled. Amazing. Those butterflies in your stomach, the increased heart rate, and everything that came with it. Love, I think it’s a beautiful thing. At least, until I had a daughter who has now also reached the age where she falls in love. Oh my god…
Differences
Call me an old fart, but when I was a kid there just weren’t cell phones. And let my daughter have a phone now. A smartphone too. A smartphone with all kinds of apps with which she can app, snap, tap, etc. A phone that has turned out to be a true addiction, because we now have to have that phone almost surgically removed from her claws. And of course she is ‘on’ all day long to answer the messages from her crush as quickly as possible. Because imagine that he has to wait a few minutes for a counter-message. Of course that is not possible, and that is immediately the end of the world.
In my days, I just had to wait to see her again. Or when I received a note from her or a sweet card. It just didn’t work with smoke signals. Now that cell phone rings all day. Beep beep. Ping! Yep, there’s another message. And she is immediately completely taken aback, because if she was doing something, after such a message it seems as if she has to be reset all over again. And if it were to stay with that now, but when she has left for her bed in the evening, that damn phone will also continue.
From crush to crush
My daughter used to switch crushes more easily than a pair of socks. Oddly enough, I hadn’t met a crush yet. Now she’s had the same crush for a while, so maybe this one is here to stay. We’ll see. I think this is also fairly mutual, given the phone that keeps beeping nicely during the night hours, that is, if my daughter hasn’t put the phone on silent very cunningly. What I do have to say is that she doesn’t have the same type every time. She hops from ‘Paul Walker’ type to ‘Ian Somerhalder’ type and from ‘Harry Styles’ type to ‘Tom Holland’ type. There is nothing logically about it.
The crush she’s taking home isn’t going to get it very easily. Daughter is everything to us and gentlemen should handle that with care. So we will of course first check. Think that’s part of it, such a ballot committee aka cross-examination. You’ve been hearing some weird stuff lately, and after all, we want what’s best for our kids, don’t we? I am a proud daddy, just like all other dads should be, who own a daughter. A son is different after all, isn’t it?
From 0 to 100
It’s all happening so fast all of a sudden. From a giggling chicken, who thought kissing was still ‘eeeew’, and certainly didn’t like boys at all, because ‘boys are stupid’, to an adolescent young lady who suddenly comes up with a crush. Of course it is never told directly to me, but always to my wife first, because hey, imagine daddy knows, what then? Then all of a sudden things get serious. The time between the chick and the young female has gone super fast in my opinion. Maybe a little too fast.
I hope her lasting crush is someone I can get along with too. I mean, in the past I’ve talked about my opinion about the concept of ‘family’, and that I might see it differently than the average person, but such a crush also runs in a family. My family. I will accept my daughter’s choice until there is no other way, and if things are allowed to turn out differently and my daughter is wronged, her crush will be crushed literally and figuratively.