11 Things To Do When Your Crush Doesn’t Want You Back
Realize how much you were happy to exaggerate or ignore because you wanted to keep the image you have of them in your head completely perfect.
1. Delete them off of all social media, because you know that, at least for the near future, all of your interaction with their profiles is going to be purely unhealthy and masochistic, and there is no reason to put yourself through that. (Especially when you can’t even hold onto the hope you used to cling to that one day they would magically confess that they felt the same way about you.)
2. Organize a night with your friends where you are allowed to talk about anything, and do anything, as long as it does not involve crushes or liking people or having feelings that aren’t reciprocated. Even though you can always talk about these things later, there should be at least one night that is just about fun and distraction. And when you feel that “I’ve had too much vodka I need to cry for an extended period of time in the corner now” feeling, that’s when you turn up the music even louder and start a dance circle.
3. Have another night with friends (just the really close ones, though, maybe even just your best friend) where you talk about everything really serious. Leave no stone unturned and be completely honest about how broken your heart is so that, no matter what else happens, you don’t still have the feeling of needing to get things off of your chest.
4. Make a physical list — on paper and everything — of all the reasons that it’s good you are not with them. The little things they did that would annoy you, the differences you have, the things about you that they do not value or acknowledge.
5. Make another list of all the things about them that you inflated because of your feelings for them. Realize how much you were happy to exaggerate or ignore because you wanted to keep the image you have of them in your head completely perfect. Maybe they’re not that good-looking, not that funny, not that similar to you in every way. They don’t have to be the worst person in the world, but they certainly aren’t as immaculate as your brain wanted to make them seem.
6. Sign up for a dating website, if only to remind yourself that there are so many other options out there and so many people who are actually interested in getting to know you. Look at all the profiles of people who seem like they would be interesting if you weren’t unable to think of anyone but your crush — bookmark their pages.
7. Go out on a date with someone, and remember that you don’t have to make a promise to them about anything. Allow yourself to be surprised by all the ways they aren’t like your crush, and how that can actually be better than everything you actually wanted in the first place. Laugh and have a few glasses of wine because, just like what happened with your crush, this won’t be the end of the world.
8. Start writing in a journal or blog about the way you feel every day — even if you never show it to anyone, or get rid of it when a little time has passed — make note of all the wonderful, bad, interesting, and mundane things that happen which have nothing to do with your crush. Allow them to accumulate around you in a kind of reassuring proof that life is actually continuing.
9. Take yourself out for a nice day of (moderate) luxury. Buy yourself a little trinket, go thrift store hunting, eat lunch for one out on a sunny terrace and enjoy the fact that pleasure can come from so many places other than the approval of romantic interests.
10. Throw away the conversations you had with your crush — online or through text — and don’t safeguard them someplace to find later. You will only torture yourself and ask yourself, over and over, where you possibly went wrong. The truth is, you went wrong the second you were you, and there is nothing you could have done to change that. Accepting that it is simply you which is not desirable is hard, but in many ways reassuring. It wasn’t a game that you didn’t play correctly.
11. Channel your pent-up energy directly into a work or school project. Because if you’re going to be emotionally dead for the next few months, you might as well be the kind of emotionally dead which leads to inhuman levels of cold success. 
