I Am in Love

I have a confession. I am in love. Unfortunately this love is unrequited, but I haven't lost hope that one day my Prince Charming will realize that he feels the same way about me. In fact, I have this idea in my head that I'm going to run into him on the beach in Cabo next week and we will fall in love while drinking margaritas and eating enchiladas to the sound of a mariachi band in a cantina. I'm sure you are all wondering who my future husband is, so I'll just go ahead and share this. It's Rob Gronkowski, tight end for the New England Patriots. Just writing his name makes me giggle. He's perfect- hilarious, loves his family and animals, athletic, likes to have fun, and so, so attractive. Unfortunately, my best friend also is in love with Gronk. But it's okay, because I have dibs on him when we meet, and we can talk about him without any judgment.

I never really thought about my love for Gronk in a greater context until our class yesterday where we talked about parasocial romantic relationships for girls and women. While we were going through lecture, I was busy relating the concepts to my own tumultuous parasocial romantic history. This made me realize things about my own development that I had not thought about previously. I never really had celebrity crushes when I was in elementary or middle school. I had huge crushes on boys in my class, but I think that celebrities seemed a little too old and dangerous for me at the time. When I got to high school, I fell in love with Tim Riggins, from Friday Night Lights. Then I found myself crushing hard on Cristiano Ronaldo, Cal from Timeflies, and then Eric Decker, who played for the Denver Broncos for a few years. Karniol's article "Adolescent Females’ Idolization of Male Media
Stars as a Transition Into Sexuality" put this into perspective for me. She found that girls who want or have a boyfriend choose nonfeminine idol, while those who are not interested in a boyfriend choose feminine idols. When I was younger, and not interested in boys or sex, I didn't really have celebrity crushes, but when I got older, I found myself crushing on masculine, bad-boy celebrities. Similarly, while reading Theran et al's article "Adolescent Girls' Parasocial Interactions With Media Figures," I was glad to see that parasocial relationships with male celebrities are a normal part of development for adolescent girls. Armed with this knowledge, I know that I love Gronk, and even though this is completely one-sided, I'm okay with that.