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By Kirsten Love
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My husband, Richard, watched as I applied a third coat of mascara. I saw him take in my hairstyle, full and lushly blow-dried instead of my usual ponytail, and pink lipstick instead of Chapstick. He eyed my formfitting clothing, and my heels, which I no longer broke out even for our infrequent date nights.
“Getting ready for your doctor crush. Looking good,” he said.
I continued primping, guilt staining my cheeks, neither confirming nor denying. Richard had never been the jealous type, but he was on to me: I had a crush on my daughters’ doctor.
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Our kids have a lot of doctors. Our youngest was born more than two months premature, and both daughters have rare—and completely different—growth disorders, so when the kids were young, doctors were the peers I saw most often. We spent countless hours in children’s hospitals, sacred spaces. From the parking garage to the office there are two guarantees: that you will share an elevator with children with significant illness and disability and, if you look, you will see a parent alone on a bench, crying. Our every visit to the children’s hospital was fraught with fear about our kids’ diagnoses, worries about their future, as well as gratitude that their challenges weren’t graver. The stress was hard on our marriage and compounded when we learned of the increased rate of divorce for parents of kids with medical complexity. But having a doctor crush provided an escape, allowing for happier emotions to coexist with all the dread and stress.
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Each doctor who extended care to our children was instantly beloved by me, but my affection for one had veered from beloved to besotted. My favorite doctor was renowned for his expertise with the rarest of growth disorders. His bedside manner was equally five-star, a rare respite from the genius specialists whose brains seemed to crowd out commonsense kindness. I looked forward to bantering with him and making him laugh.
What did Richard have to look forward to during these appointments, many of which contained bad news? During fatigued moments, I didn’t care. At those times, the doctors seemed preferable marital substitutes—like Richard, partnering in the children’s care and taking on the rarity of the girls’ conditions with enthusiasm. But they didn’t complain about the messy house or stress about bills.
Would Richard have fallen for a doctor if our roles had been reversed? If he had been the stay-at-home parent toting toddlers to hospitals, if more of the specialists were women?
My doctor crush also played itself out via email, and I crafted my messages to him with the care and precision of a dissertation. His name in my inbox was like a text from a lover, with the power to instantly improve my mood. I reread his emails, savoring any repartee, any single word superfluous to the utilitarian purpose of the text.
Richard bore it all with good humor, complimenting me before I headed out for every appointment. I didn’t ask how he was coping. I didn’t want to know about a work wife.
I had some idea of what Richard was doing to manage the stress. At work, he was open about our medical journey, sharing information about the girls’ diagnoses and procedures in a way that seemed a far healthier outlet, but was intractable to me. Among friends and neighbors, I guarded our privacy, uneasy at the thought of them reducing our children to a list of symptoms or the name of a genetic syndrome. At Mommy and Me events, I felt like a case study of the many ways children’s health could go awry. I saw how some fellow parents shrank from me as though our clinical trajectory was contagious.
During lockdown, getting ready for a telehealth appointment included setting up a ring light to enhance my appearance on camera, and I staged our dining room to seem more inviting, welcoming the doctor crush as though he was actually in our home. The view of his own dining room gave me a charge, a peek into a space too private for a patient.
For years, I felt guilty about my doctor crush, and I hid it away like any shameful secret, until I met the mother of another child in the rare disease family.
“I think I’m in love with his doctor,” she confessed.
I could have hugged her. Suddenly I had someone who understood my doctor crush. Together we considered how and why our doctor crushes helped us: transmuting dreaded appointments into dates worthy of excitement and even happiness. The Doctor Crush—a feeling of warmth and awe directed towards the person best equipped to help your beloved child—is a sustaining practice, allowing a parent to persist through the marathon of navigating rare disease.
When you have stars in your eyes for your child’s doctor, it gives an extra boost, which allows us to do hard things, like holding kids as they endure prodding and poking and procedures and pain. It allows for a softer landing of hard news; it makes even interminable waiting rooms feel hopeful. Caring and advocating for kids with medical needs is exhausting and doctor crushes help provide a needed burst of energy as we advocate to get their extra needs met. It fulfills a yearning to connect with someone besides a spouse who understands the uniqueness of your child and of your life, a shorthand that does not exist among friends whose children are healthy.
Occasionally there was a physician who inspired actual fantasy, such as the Colin Firth doppelganger who, thankfully, stopped taking our insurance. Doctor crushes are one thing, existing in a liminal space between infatuation and admiration, but a fixation on a movie-star-handsome man would have been counterproductive. Who had time for an affair, even an imagined one?
The doctor crush was a safe space, akin to the celebrity crush yet shy of a hall pass— puppy love, a harmless diversion never to be acted upon. The doctor I crushed on was but one in a stream of kind and intelligent doctors we were lucky to know—pediatrics definitely appeals to the more humane types.
The relationship between families and their pediatric doctors is singular, and intimate beyond measure. Conversations with my husband were about meal planning, errands, work scheduling … the boring minutiae of domestic life in a marriage intended to last forever. Time with the doctors was limited and vital, the unspoken understanding that we will part ways when the patient turns 18. With a series of brief meetings drawn into such a specific, finite timeline, our relationship felt almost … romantic.
Then, one day, an Instagram meme changed everything. I sifted through a carousel of slides listing well-known fear responses—fight, flight or freeze—and including a little-known fourth F: fawn. When I looked up the verb “fawn” in the dictionary, I recognized my behavior in both unflattering definitions: “to court favor by a cringing or flattering manner,” or “to show affection, used especially of a dog.” Social media may be no substitute for mental healthcare, but in a single moment, it deepened my understanding of my motivations. My outsized affection for the girls’ doctor was actually a trauma response, my flirtatious deference a recognized reaction to a terrifying situation. I flirted with the doctor in order to keep him on our side, to prioritize my children.
In the seconds it took me to read the meme, my crush on the doctor shifted. For the first time, I saw it for what it was: a coping mechanism that got me through a prolonged search for diagnoses, and from grief to acceptance of our daughters’ conditions.
Throughout our years of medical upheaval, Richard and I remained close: best friends and partners on the same page about everything from the care of our children to politics to TV shows. He was my favorite person, but our relationship was not my priority. My priority was tending to our children while trying to figure out why neither was growing, which took us through a gauntlet of specialists, tests and procedures.
My husband, my original crush, is still handsome after all these years. Richard is my favorite teller of Dad jokes, my partner in banter, my email flirtation, my pop culture simpatico. The perfect wingman, he bolstered my confidence and never stole the spotlight. Richard is my expert on navigating health insurance, my fellow medical sleuth, the one who truly understands our unique family. Richard is my lasting crush; a crush not rooted in trauma.
My husband’s tolerance of my doctor crush was a generosity extended to help me get through the hardest time in our lives. Allowing me my crush showed his trust and love for me, encouraging me to find a slice of joy in every situation. Our marriage survived not despite my doctor crush, but because of it. And while my doctor crush required better lighting, my marriage needs no ring light.
Kirsten Love is writing a memoir, Little Girls*, about her daughters’ rare growth disorders. She’s on Substack @kirstenloveswriting and Instagram @ReadRunSew.*
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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