i've had a couple of crushes that were downright irritating too. i came to realise that in some ways, some of the crushes i've had were just the best way my brain had of 'digesting' information that it wasn't accustomed to dealing with. or of dealing with situations it had no prior experience of. it's like there's me, there's a person, i'll need to 'relate' to this person in some kind of way . . . but i have no information on this. so sometimes in that situation (especially when i was much younger) it would just kind grab for the default 'explanation' for their existence in my universe, and give me a crush. it's like getting a rash if you're fed with some foodstuff your system has never learned how to process before.
so those kinds of crushes are just like having a summer cold. irritating, upsetting, not life-threatening and they'll go away as soon as you get used to whoever it is. a more serious kind can't be explained away in those terms, and it's a little more personal, a little more actually 'about' the person i get the crush on. in other words, there are reasons why i grow a crush on this person, and not on anyone else.
i like to study those ones. they always tell me something i end up being better off for having figured out. there's always some specific quality about the person that set it off, and/or there's a specific quality and theme to my daydreams and my own emotions. there's something i want from them. in other words, that means that there's something i want, and somehow this person has become someone who, in my mind, can 'give' it to me. or it's something i'm able to imagine myself getting if i were 'with' that person. i like to ask: what? what do they have that feels so necessary? why is it necessary? what do i feel it will 'do' for me if i were to get it? you learn really interesting things about your own self that way. even MORE interesting can be if you study your crushes in a sequential order, over a growth period. by comparing what you were yearning for 'then' with whatever you might have found yourself yearning for a few months or years later on, you can really sometimes find out just how much you've already progressed, or regressed, or grown.
studying crushes for the self-awareness in them is my one big secret-weapon discovery of the past 30 years.