A crush experience switches special interest off

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It has happened twice in my life now (assuming this current case is what I think it is) that a crush experience has switched off my strong special interests to which I had put heaps of time during roughly two previous years.

This time it's a pretty dramatic since I was just about to submit a research plan related to this interest. However, this thing perhaps just hastened something that would have been inevitable in any case.

Okay... so, sexually attractive people can really change your life (even if you don't manage to establish a relationship with them, like in my cases). That's true for almost everybody but for me it's true in a kind of special and very concrete way.

I wonder if other people have had similar experiences

Of course. That's how it always works for me. Obsessing over a crush has absolute precedence over special interests and about everything else as well.

Seems to work for me as well. What better thing to obsess over than a nice, sweet, attractive woman.

Same for me too.

Yup. When alone I can code for 15 to 20 hours straight (except for food...) but when my husband and I are living together I just... don't worry about it. Thankfully he's living far away during the last 3 years of my doctoral program. Well, kind of thankfully. You know what I mean.

It seems you are probably talking about cases when a crush makes it difficult to concentrate on other things (including a special interest) or leads to a temporal lack of interest towards other things. But I am talking about a case in which a crush triggers a mental process which leads to a complete rejection of an interest.

Yeah this definitely happens to me. It's one of the reasons I have been having trouble concentrating lately. Although I always saw it as the crush being a special interest. Because if I have a crush I become almost singularly focused on that person. It's a good thing I'm so aware of the boundaries of what's appropriate or else it could get me into trouble.

I can't see the difference. It's similar as when a new interest takes over which might lead to dropping or rejecting older interests. A crush is just like a new special interest, with absolute priority.

For me, the crush is not much of a priority, I think (that person is far away anyway). It just pushed my mind towards another directions and caused me to abandon my interest (probably permanently, like last time, though not 100% sure).

For you or for your brain? The brain seems to have its own opinion about what is most important that your conscious self might not share.



Maybe it just acted like a catalysator, and this might have happened anyway?

Well, it's of course a kind of difficult to assess what does that crush really mean to me. I actually became a bit more interested in some things that are related to that person.



Yes, that's possible.