July will always be the end of term. You may have been out of school for a decade or more. You may have left full time education at 16 to make your mark on a tax return, if not the world. You may have run screaming from the school gates at 18, determined to never think of those years again. And yet we have a Pavlovian response to July that tells us term is ending. The clinging shirt, the scrape of chairs, the drying lawns and leaky biros; the airless rooms and fly-smudged windows sing of summer and the end of term. Which means just one thing: it’s time to tell someone you love them.
Okay, it may not be love. It’s probably not love. In fact, it may just be lust. Or infatuation. Or furious longing tinged with hope. But whatever it is, however you feel, now is the time to say so. Because if not now, then when?
A study carried out by Asda - of course it was by Asda - found recently that teenage girls spend up to eight weeks searching for a dress to wear to their end-of-term prom. Twenty six and a half hours, to be precise. Which is twice as long as the average bride spends finding her “special” dress, and four times as long as it takes me to build a shed. Isn’t that wonderful? Of course, the idea of some market researcher loitering around a supermarket with a clipboard to check how long a girl has been idly fingering a shiny polyester frock is beautiful in itself. But it also speaks to just how seriously we take our end-of-term exit. How badly we want to impress our classmates. How hotly we long to be kissed in the corner of a carpark while the crickets sing.
Far too many of us waste our precious years of carefree, wrinkle-free crushing by keeping it a secret. We hide that crush like a stain, bury it like stolen goods, throw it into the long grass in the desperate hope that nobody will notice. I once mowed my friend Ben’s entire lawn in some misguided belief that he would fall in love with me, and yet was filled with utter dread at the thought of him finding out that I fancied him. I carved Jos Baker’s initials into my desk during science with a compass, but would swear blind to anyone who asked that I’d never had a crush on him in my life. To the adolescent school pupil and blinking undergraduate alike, the end of term infatuation is a love that dares not speak its name.
Part of the reason, of course, is fear of rejection. We are horrified by the idea that if we show someone the soft underbelly of our feelings then they will immediately dance across them in hobnailed boots. Worse, that they will hate us for it. That we will repulse, dismay or alienate someone simply by telling them that we like them. Well, as John Steinbeck wrote in his wonderful 1958 letter to his son: “If you love someone – there is no possible harm in saying so – only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.” Nobody but a psychopath will feel anything but pleased to hear that someone finds them attractive. Approach it in the right way – with respect, understanding and casual sincerity – and they will at best be pleased, at worst surprised. And, as Steinbeck continues, if your feelings are not returned, for whatever reason “that does not make your feeling less valuable and good”.
The other obstacle, of course, is shame. We are taught that to open ourselves to the vulnerability of affection is somehow shameful; that it makes us weak, wet and wimpering. That the mature and macho thing to do is play it cool and act like robots. Which is also rubbish. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his novel Shame: “Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.” If you confess your crush to someone at the end of term, you probably won’t even see them again for weeks, maybe months. By the time you roll back into class, college or the office, the whole thing will be forgotten in a haze of sunburn and melted Soleros. They’ll have moved on with their lives. It will have become mundane. Nobody but you will still give a hoot.
There are people I haven’t seen for a decade, since university, with whom I was too crippled by shame to confess my feelings. Perhaps that was wise – at the time I looked like a middle-aged Roxy Music impersonator in a tabard – but it was also stupid. Because it meant I never gave myself, or them, the chance for something good to happen. And that’s the thing; to have a crush on someone without telling them is to actively withhold information that they might need. They may be making all sorts of decisions and assumptions based on the idea that you don’t like them; that nobody likes them. It is a form of self-protective deceit that can, if left untended, cause havoc.
So this July, whether you’re scribbling your name in felt tip on your friend’s school shirt or downing warm glasses of white wine after your final exams, don’t try so hard to swallow your feelings. Don’t deny someone the compliment of a crush, or the pleasure of being liked. Just tell them, briefly and respectfully, that you think they’re good looking and that you have a crush on them. Put the ball in their court. See what comes back. And if the worst comes to the worst, you can always pass it off as midsummer madness. After all, a little crush can’t kill us.