Sounds like a pretty special guy. Nonetheless:

I decided to leave him behind when I left for college.

But he wouldn’t let me. Whenever I believed he was out of my life, I’d get a text or Facebook comment that would reel me back in.

And I wouldn’t let me, either. His affection, however sporadic, always loomed like a promise. So I accepted his invitation, asking myself what I had to lose.

I lost a lot that weekend: A bet on the football game. Four pounds (from nerve-driven appetite loss). A pair of underwear. My innocence, apparently.

Naïvely, I had expected to gain clarity, to finally admit my feelings and ask if he felt the same. But I couldn’t confess, couldn’t probe.

And so:

[M]ore than three years after our first kiss and more than a year after our first time, I’m still not over the possibility of him, the possibility of us. And he has no idea.

There’s a word for this feeling. The word is LOVE. Jordana is in love with Jeremy.

Her friend, Shosh, can see it – that’s why she tries to talk her out of it:

My friend Shosh insists that I don’t actually have feelings for Jeremy.

“You don’t know him anymore,” she says. “I think maybe you’re addicted to the memories, in love with a person you’ve idealized who probably isn’t real.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe my emotions are steeped in a past that never presented itself. Still, he envelops my thoughts. And anyway, Shosh has a Jeremy of her own, another guy at another school she holds both close and far away.

Right: Shosh has what used to be called a friend-with-benefits, someone she is emotionally close to but not in love with, who she sleeps with periodically. And she’s fine with that arrangement. She thinks Jordana’s Jeremy is in the same place as her Jeremy – fine with this arrangement as is. She wants Jordana to conform to that model – which means convincing herself that she is not in love with Jeremy – so that she’ll be happier. And it’s true – it’s a lot easier to be happy in a shallow kind of way without love. Particularly unrequited love.

This is not new. People have been trying to convince themselves that they are or are not in love with someone that they should or should not be in love with since the invention of love. They are still doing it – single people, married people, divorced people; love can be an awkward intrusion or a present absence for anybody. More often than not, the effort to convince is not very convincing.

But that’s not Jordana’s problem. Here’s her problem:

I’ve brooded over the same person for the last four years. Can I honestly call myself empowered if I’m unable to share my feelings with him? Could my options be more closed? Could I be less in control?

My father can’t understand why I won’t tell Jeremy how I feel. To me, it’s simple. As involved as we’ve been for what amounts to, at this point, nearly a quarter of my life, Jeremy and I are technically nothing, at least as far as labels are concerned.

So while I teeter between anger with myself for not admitting how I feel and anger at him for not figuring it out, neither of us can be blamed. (Or we both can.) Without labels to connect us, I have no justification for my feelings and he has no obligation to acknowledge them.

Her father asks her why she doesn’t just tell him how she feels, and she says she can’t because . . . nobody else has made a formal declaration of what their relationship is. But who could that “somebody else” possibly be?

Jordana’s problem is that she is waiting for Jeremy’s permission to say how she feels and to ask for what she wants. She wants him to say “I love you,” and he hasn’t done it. And she is terrified that if she says it first, if she explicitly or implicitly makes any demands, that he will refuse those demands, refuse to reciprocate.

She is, in other words, letting a man take advantage of her feelings for him, and hurt her, because she is afraid of losing him.

This. Is. Not. New.

And it’s not Jeremy’s fault – not at this point. It’s Jordana’s. It is entirely her responsibility to decide when it’s time to speak her mind, and then to do so. If he turns her down because he’s afraid of commitment, and misses out on what might be the love of his life, that’s his fault – not hers for speaking. But she can’t wait for “permission” from a label that he alone has the power to apply. She has to apply the label. Herself. She has to say how she feels. And then face the consequences of that truth.

This is just part of growing up, part of what everybody has to go through and has always had to go through since the moment we started letting young people find mates for themselves instead of being forced into marriage with whoever their parents preferred. This is the way love works. You have to take emotional risks to get it – and those risks might not pay off. You have to weigh your self-respect against your desires – and you can’t let either be an absolute trump card.

If her friends won’t give her that advice, maybe it’s because they’ve never experienced love. Maybe it’s because they don’t want to experience love. Is that about wanting to preserve romantic choice, sexual autonomy? I somehow doubt it. I suspect it’s more about wanting to preserve choice outside the realm of sex, to preserve autonomy from romance. It’s about, as Jordana says at one point, wanting to avoid drama.

But that’s the thing about love: it’s not something you choose. It’s something that chooses you. And when you think about it, avoiding drama is a pretty lame approach to life, isn’t it?

If I were giving Jordana advice, that advice would be:

• Read Chekhov, all the major plays. Start with The Seagull and The Three Sisters to learn something about unrequited or imperfectly requited love. Dive into the depths of Masha and Vershinin’s affair, or Nina and Trigorin’s – but also listen to Konstantin’s longing for Nina and Masha’s for Konstantin; Kulygin’s for Masha and Olga’s for Kulygin – and of course Tuzenbach’s for Irina. And then read Uncle Vanya to fully appreciate the futility of a life spent avoiding drama. Learn that what you are struggling with is not new, that your feelings have sufficient dignity and scope to have inspired great art. That should make you feel a bit better, I think.
• Then, take a step back, and a deep breath, and ask yourself: do you really believe that there is only one Jeremy in the whole world? That you will never – could never – feel love for anybody else? That no one will ever remind you of him, or that you’d have to blot out the memory of him entirely to ever feel a deep longing for someone else? Do you really believe that if he doesn’t feel the same way about you, that this is the best you can hope for in life – clinging to the sleeve of someone who doesn’t love you the way you love him? Do you want to be a character in a Chekhov play?
• If, with your cold rational mind, you know the answer to all of those questions is “no,” then tell him how you feel. Tell him you are in love with him, and that you’ve been in love with him for a long time, and that you need to know if he feels the same way; that he has to be an adult and tell you the truth. He might surprise you by saying he loves you, too, and that he wouldn’t want to lose you. Or he might say that he doesn’t want to change the way things are – that you’re a very special friend and he doesn’t see why that should preclude having sex now and again. Or he might not be an adult, and fail to answer the question in any coherent way. Whatever he says, you’ll know the answer to the question that is causing you so much pain.

And whatever he says, this phase – the phase of painful, unspoken, possibly unrequited love, which is not some modern invention but has existed forever – this phase will be over. You’ll be in a new phase, and you’ll learn what that’s like. You’ll have done a bit of growing up.

There’s no substitute for that process, and no shortcut. Nor has there ever been.