Come on, how adorable is that?

If the object of your girl affection is famous, or even someone you are worshiping from afar, it must by necessity remain a crush.

Webster's unabridged lists no derivation for the origin of the word "crush," but I'm going to guess that it comes from a combination of "crazy" and "rush," because that's exactly what happens. Sometimes there are actual physical symptoms to a girl crush, and they are all unpleasant: sweating, trembling, heart palpitations.

There is also an element of fantasy involved in these relationships, and the idea of your crush usually falls apart when you try to consider it in reality. When I tried to imagine myself with the CNN storm-flying girl, I sort of pictured us both in those cool jumpsuits saying, "That's affirmative!" but I couldn't really figure out a reason why I'd be with her, or where I'd get my jumpsuit, and I started to realize how silly my girl crush was becoming.

When your girl crush does not involve a notable or famous person, it can often mellow into a friendship, and that is the best.

Parting Ways

Now, the dark side of the girl crush is the girl breakup. Whereas men (outside of characters in Tennessee Williams plays) don't generally get crushes on each other, they are also wise enough to avoid the dreaded breakup, because that's when every mutual friend you have ever shared with your ex-crush is forced to weigh in and take sides.

I have never once heard of guy friends "breaking up." They might have a big fistfight, but at least they maintain the dignity to let a friendship that is over just fade away. Women, on the other hand, usually turn it into a drama festival, one that often culminates in the ever-popular email tell-off. Jan Yager, author of Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives, advises against this: "Email has made it too easy to express thoughts and feelings that once you hit 'send' you may regret."

I had a friend named Ruth, who I once would have described as my best friend. Ruth was a professional mentor I had a girl crush on, who then became an actual friend. I admired both her giant brain and the coppery red hair that fell in perfect ringlets to cover it. I had never cared for her controlling, perpetually unemployed husband, but since I also had a controlling, perpetually unemployed husband, I didn't give it much thought at the time.

When I left my marriage, she was the only friend I had that was against it, and that was the beginning of the end. I should have seen that the friendship was partly based on us both having unhappy personal lives.

When I got into a new, healthy relationship, she couldn't bear to be around me. She had told me when I divorced, "I don't want to hear all your little stories of dating. Save that for your other girlfriends." Apparently if I wasn't going to stay unhappily married, as she was, I was to keep quiet about my new life. My personal happiness, which every other significant person in my life had celebrated, was keenly painful to her.

So she "broke up" with me. Oddly, it was more painful than my divorce, but maybe because I had seen the divorce coming. It ended with an email from her, in all caps, telling me to "STAY AWAY FROM OUR HOUSE!!!!" It was the email equivalent of screaming, and it was so unlike Ruth that it shocked me.