The Ultimate Guide to INFJ Crushes: Lessons 7 and 8

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Lesson 7: Limit the Fantasizing and Ruminating

Fantasizing and ruminating are two of the main fuel sources for unrequited love. If you spend most of your time fantasizing about your crush and ruminating over the significance of every interaction with them, you’ll have little time left over to get to know them in real life. And that means you’ll have little time to find out whether there’s real relationship potential there or not.

Fantasies

As I mentioned in Lesson 2, your reality and your crush’s reality may be very different. One of the things that can contribute to this enormous difference is your fantasies. And we INFJs with our vivid imaginations can craft some wonderful fantasies.

But a big problem with them is that it can be very hard for a real person to live up to them. In your reveries, you’re likely idealizing your crush and what it means to be in a relationship with them.

Maybe you throw some conflict in there from time to time just to keep things interesting. But in general, we like to use fantasies to give us pleasures we’re not enjoying in the real world—sometimes even pleasures we can’t enjoy in the real world. That’s why when we talk about fantasy novels and fantasy movies, we’re talking about worlds that don’t exist in reality.

If you spend a lot of time dwelling on these fantasies and idealizations, you’re not getting to know who your crush is in real life. They might be an amazing person, but you won’t really know that until you get to know them in person. And because you enjoy your fantasies so much, you may actually be reluctant to get to know your crush and experience a real relationship with them because you’re afraid it won’t live up to the fantasy in your mind.

Even so, if you do want to enjoy a romantic relationship in real life, you’ll probably want to limit the fantasies. You can have a few, but if you don’t want to have too many unrealistic expectations for this relationship, you’re going to have to reserve most of your interactions with your crush for real life.

And just so you know, these fantasies can happen whether most of your interactions with your crush are in person or online. But when we’re talking about an online crush, it’s even easier for them to become a fantasy person.

When someone is only interacting with you online, they’re probably already going to want to hide their flaws and only present the sides of them that they want you to see. This polished version of them is ideal fodder for fantasies. So, please know that if you’re only interacting with someone online, it will be hard for you to know how you really feel about them and whether there’s relationship potential for you two until you meet in person.

Also, fantasies will be one of the only sources of fuel for your crushes if you’ve never even met the person or interacted with them. So, again, keep in mind that having a relationship with your crush will have to involve in-person interactions at some point. And until you get to know the real person, any love you may feel for them will be love for an idea of them.

What to Do Instead

Instead of losing yourself in fantasy, try getting to know your crush on a human level. If you can, go get some coffee together. Talk to them in person. Learn about their strengths and weaknesses, their flaws and strong points.

If you’re feeling bold enough, you can even consider asking them on a date so you can get to know them in a more romantic setting. But if you would rather just get to know them as friends, you can do that, too.

Just try to get to know the real person in real life. Don’t rely on the wonderful fluttery feelings you get when you imagine an idealized version of them. If you do that, the real person—who might actually be an incredible person—will disappoint you. We INFJs already have high standards when it comes to relationships. We don’t need to add to them by envisioning our crush as an idealized person.

Also, I do believe you can feel a strong connection to someone even if you’ve never met in person or have only known each other a short time. But getting to know each other in real life and getting to know the other person as a whole person are the only ways to have a real, long-term relationship with them.

Rumination

Rumination can involve dwelling on all the real-life interactions you do have with your crush, but then infusing them with such immense significance that they become almost unreal. This can turn a simple text into a love confession and an act of kindness into a revelation of hidden feelings. I talk about an experience I had with INFJ rumination here.

In this way, rumination isn’t much different than fantasizing, which we’ve already established is not the best way to get to know a real person in the hopes of one day having a relationship with them.

But rumination can also involve thoughts like these:

“Why haven’t they responded to that message I sent them last week? I wish they would respond already. They must be busy. But they can’t be so busy that they can’t just take a second to respond to that message, can they? Something else must be keeping them from responding. Or maybe they just have such strong feelings for me, they’re struggling to express them. Maybe I should say something. Maybe I should confess my feelings. Should I confess my feelings? Maybe I should just send another message. Or maybe I should call. No, text will be better.”

As I mentioned in Lesson 2, these are thoughts coming from the subjective mind. At no point are these thoughts saying things like, “You know, it’s way too soon to know whether or not this person has feelings for me. Maybe I should get to know them better before I even think about confessing.”

Or, “Maybe they’re not responding more quickly because they’re just not interested. Oh well. I have plenty of other stuff to keep my mind occupied. I don’t need to be sitting around waiting for a text from someone who only sees me as a friend.”

These would be thoughts from the objective mind, the thoughts of logic and reason.

While I don’t believe you can always choose the thoughts that enter you mind, you can choose which thoughts to focus on. If you allow your subjective mind to do most of the talking, it’s very likely that you’ll end up doing something like confessing prematurely or becoming obsessed with someone who only sees you as a friend.

But if you decide to bring your objective mind into the picture, even while you experience all those loving crush feelings, you’re in a better position to stay calm and get to know the real person in real life. This is the only way you’ll be able to have a relationship with them someday, if that’s what you want.

When You’re Not Ready for the Fantasy to End

It is possible that you don’t actually want the fantasy in your mind to end. Maybe you’re not ready for a real relationship with someone, but you enjoy having those loving feelings. I don’t think this is too much of a problem unless you allow it to keep you from the possibility of ever having a real relationship with someone.

If you’re not ready yet, that’s fine. But if you’re not exploring real feelings with someone in person because you’re so used to your fantasies, you’ll definitely want to limit them and focus on getting to know your crush and potential partners in real life.

It’s one thing if you’re just enjoying those loving feelings while waiting to be ready for a real relationship. It’s another thing when you use fantasy and unrequited love as an escape from reality. While reality may not be able to live up to your fantasies, you have to decide where you want to have the most fun—in your mind or in real life.

Lesson 8: Find an Outlet

When you have an intense crush, you’re going to experience some complex, confusing, complicated, and even conflicting emotions. Although some of them may feel wonderful, some may feel consuming or overwhelming. And if you don’t have an outlet for them, they can take over and cause you to do desperate or out-of-character things. They can also cloud your judgment, making it harder for you to look at your situation objectively and make wise decisions about what to do.

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about two different outlets INFJs can consider for expressing these emotions: journaling and creativity.

Journaling

As an INFJ, you may find journaling therapeutic because INFJs tend to be naturally drawn to writing as a form of self-expression. Journaling can also provide you with a safe space for you to share your strongest and most powerful emotions.

No one can judge you while you journal, so you’re free to explore all your crush feelings on your own. (Hopefully you can withhold the judgment from yourself as well.) This can be especially appealing to INFJs who tend to be private individuals.

Understanding Emotions

Journaling can help you better understand your emotions. Because once those emotions are out in the open, so to speak, you’re in a better position to analyze them. For instance, if you’re experiencing conflicting feelings about someone, you may be able to understand why by reading back over what you’ve written.

You may also be able to better understand how deep your love for this person goes and how the situation might be affecting you—physically, emotionally, and mentally. Being able to observe all these things will put you in a better position to pull back on some of your emotions if you need to.

And it might help you make some healthier decisions about how to spend your time. For instance, if you notice that your love for someone leads you to devote most of your attention to them, you may consider whether you would be better off doing something for your own personal development (see Lesson 5).

But, seriously, don’t skip the analysis part of journaling.

Letting out your feelings and emotions is important, but then read back over what you’ve written. This is a step I failed to do when I was in the middle of some of my most intense crushes. But if I had done it, I might have noticed things like how obsessive my love had become (a form of unrequited love called “limerence”).

Objective Perspective

In Lesson 2, I talked about how an INFJ’s feeling-based approach to love can mean that things like logic and reason usually take a backseat. But being able to look at your situation from a more objective place can help you make wiser and healthier decisions.

For example, your fervent emotions may lead you to believe that you’re so deeply and passionately in love with someone that you just have to confess your feelings to them. But when you take time to look at the situation objectively, you’ll realize that your relationship is mostly one-sided.

You’re the one doing most of the reaching out. You’re the one arranging encounters. You’re the one starting most of the conversations. You’re the one going out of your way for this person, or the one who’s always willing to.

If you start to notice this pattern, you may be able to reflect on the situation and decide that maybe it’s better for you not to confess after all. In fact, you might even prefer to move on, something I’ll talk about more in Lesson 10.

But while you may not be able to see all this clearly when just thinking about your crush situation, journaling can help you look at your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors more objectively. And if you don’t find stream of consciousness journaling to be helpful, you can always respond to journal prompts.

If you’re interested, you can click here for a list of 17 journal prompts to help you get started.

Creativity

INFJs tend to be very creative people. This creativity can come out in their writing, but they can excel in any art form they choose to dedicate themselves to, whether it be poetry, music, pottery, painting, or any other creative medium.

When you have a crush, you may find that just journaling about your feelings isn’t enough. This means you’re going to want to have an additional or alternative outlet for them.

I find that there’s a unique emotional release you get from expressing yourself through something more artistic than journaling. Any art form that you feel comfortable with will do. But if you can’t think of any medium in particular that you would like to use, I think poetry is a great option for INFJs. And here are four reasons why I think so.

4 Reasons Poetry Is a Great Way for INFJs to Express Crush Feelings

1. Art is cathartic.
   Art in general is a great way to release emotions. And I find poetry to be one of the most accessible art forms. In a poem you can also lay out all your intense, raw emotions in a way that, afterward, may make you feel like, “Yes, I finally said exactly what I was feeling!”
   
   Even though you don’t have to write poems using a particular structure (more on that in #3), poetry is still a way of giving a sense of order to your emotions. In a journal entry, they may be very all over the place. But one thing you can do is take a journal entry you’ve written and write a poem about it or about a particular part of it.
   
   And that’s another thing. With journal entries, you might write about many different things in one entry. But with a poem, while you can do the same, it can also be nice if you take one aspect of what you’ve written or of what you may be feeling and focus on it until you feel you’ve expressed everything you needed to express about that one thing.
   
   It’s almost like a journal entry presents a full emotional meal, while using art like poetry allows you to chew, swallow, and digest the meal one bite at a time. This can be very helpful for INFJs’ deep emotions.

2. INFJs love words.
   INFJs are known to have a flair for the written word. It’s one of the ways they like to express themselves because it gives them time to order all the many, complex thoughts they may have racing through their head at any given moment. It gives them a chance to put those thoughts into a cohesive format so they can be consumed by someone else or better understood by themselves.
   
   Poetry involves using the written word in an artistic sense. And since INFJs tend to have an innate gift for writing, their prose is likely to be poetic already. To write a poem, all an INFJ has to do is translate that poetic prose into a new medium—and maybe throw in a poetic device or two.

3. Poetry doesn’t have to have a particular structure.
   While it’s true that some poetic forms have a particular structure—like sonnets—or a particular rhyme scheme, if you want to write a poem that doesn’t have a specific form, that’s perfectly acceptable.
   
   In poetry terms this is called free verse, and poems written using this style can be just as beautiful as those with a certain structure.
   
   This is different from writing a story, for instance, where people expect a certain plot structure, whether they know it or not—like beginning, middle, and end. And songs tend to have some variation of the “verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus” structure, although they can and sometimes do vary from this.
   
   Poems can also be as short or long as you want. And if you choose to write free verse, there really aren’t any rules except this one: Write what’s true for you. Since INFJs already tend to enjoy doing their own thing—it comes with being a rare personality type—they might find it freeing to be able to express their feelings in a way that doesn’t have to have rules.

4. Other than the ability to write, poetry doesn’t require special skills.
   To write a song with musical accompaniment, you either have to learn how to play an instrument, find someone who does, or learn how to write the accompaniment with software. To write a novel, you have to have the discipline to sit down and write until the story is done.
   
   But for poetry, as soon as you’re able to write in any language, you can just pull out a pen and paper—or an app on your phone or computer, if you prefer—and start writing.
   
   The poem is done when you say it’s done. And unless you choose to share it with someone else, the only person who gets to judge the merits of your poem is you.

You Can Have More Than One Outlet

Of course, you don’t have to have only one outlet for expressing your crush feelings. You can do a combination of things.

For example, you can journal, write poetry, and paint. And you can combine these things with talking to friends and family. But as I mentioned in Lesson 3, unless they’re also INFJs or deep lovers, they probably won’t really understand what you’re talking about and will have limited patience for hearing you talk about your crush.

And don’t forget that if you’re not feeling very creative, you can always revel in the art of others. There’s an emotional release that happens when you do that, too. And it can also be nice to know that someone else has experienced (or at least expressed) what you’re experiencing, or something similar to it.

~ Ashley C.

P.S. If you feel that you’ve been acting like the side character in your own story—like settling for unrequited love when what you want is reciprocal love—you may want to rewrite it. If so, my Narrative Correction services might be just what you need. They can help you learn to see yourself as the hero of your story, aware of your value and empowered to make real changes. Simply click here to learn more.

Note: This post is part of a five-post series. If you like, you can also check out Lessons 1 and 2, Lessons 3 and 4, and Lessons 5 and 6.