Celebrity Crushes

Of course, we’re supposed to shrug it off. We’re supposed to have a quick look at a gallery of images – the kiss in the ocean, the breakfast on the veranda, the evening walk by the candle-lit restaurant – and move on. We’re meant to say it’s ridiculous and mean it.

Except that in some moods we’re no longer capable of such sangfroid. We start to follow what they are wearing every day; we go with them on their plane; we know what dog they bought; we stop talking to our family so that we can look up their new partner; we watch them making a juice in their kitchen; we look in on their exercise sessions. It’s as if they were right here, with us, all the time. We can almost taste the sea salt drying on their tanned legs; we trace the fine hairs on their arms; we are intensely knowledgeable about everything they’ve seen and eaten in the last six months.

Not only this, we know – deep down – that it could have worked with us. We’ll make light of this in public, but in our heart we know that we are their spiritual twin. If things had worked out differently, if we’d lived in Paris or New York, if we’d been the right sort of age and looked slightly better and had more convincing careers, we might have bumped into them at a gathering and the connections between us would have grown undeniable. We’re soulmates dumbly separated by a sequence of arbitrary barriers – over which the media nevertheless allows us to peer.

On certain days, the scale of the missed opportunities grows unbearable. How ugly, mean-minded, joyless and loveless our lives are. How ugly and unappreciative are our partners, how little of what we are will ever be noticed. Why do we even exist?

The celebrity stalker isn’t simply ‘mad’, their principal error is credulity. They have been unable to resist the suggestions of desire and communion that have been artfully embedded in the infatuating work of the media’s army of paparazzi. A vulnerability in their psyches has meant that they have taken seriously what the more defended and contented among us have had the wherewithal to resist – and treat as a sophisticated fantasy. Their unhappiness has made them helpless before a cruelly devised fiction – and opened them up to a distinctive kind of torture.

But what is evident is that the celebrity crush isn’t a simple inanity; it’s a serious prism through which we glimpse, with rare clarity, certain of the agonies of modern existence: Why can I not become who I really am? How can I both know the life that I should be leading and be so unable to lead it? Why do I never meet particular people whom I am convinced – perhaps not wrongly – I could have loved properly and who would have redeemed me?

There are no good answers to such questions. They are among the most melancholy and grave we can raise. That we may be nudged towards them by an actor or singer on a beach is no argument against them. Right now, in a luxurious bedroom a few hours’ flight from where we are, the person we suspect we could understand without limit is sleeping with somebody else and will in a few days go back to a life from which we will always be excluded. If we existed in a different era, we might at this point get down on our knees and pray for our wracked souls. We should now at least be afforded an opportunity to let out a cry up to the indifferent cosmos. What we should never be forced into is the belief that this constant ache might merely be a joke.