Before crushes begin in our adolescence – long before the hormone monster rears its pimply head – there is another sort of feeling. It’s one that stirs up in children every now and then. It might happen at the mere mention of a favourite non-related uncle coming to visit, or an older sister’s cooler friend, or an overseas visitor from a parent’s youth.

You – the kid you – find yourself handing over your last chicken drumstick to them, or playing a game you don’t much enjoy, just to get the chance to be around them. Maybe you’re even thinking of them before bed, wondering what you might say to them next time they magically re-enter your life.

There’s just something about this person that makes a young person wonder: do I love them, or do I want to be them? The feeling is somewhere between admiration and adoration and, if you see them often enough, it’ll be well on the way to idolatry before long. It’s not, however, anything to do with sex. Far from it. How unbecoming to think of doing that messy and awful act with this most wonderful of people.

Usually, these platonic love affairs begin around age four to eight, the time when loving someone means carrying their piece of birthday cake from the table so they don’t have to get up from the esky they’re sat on. Or, in the case of my four-year-old niece and her other aunty’s 45-year-old boyfriend, it materialises in small musings that she offers long after he’s left the dinner party, or weeks after the end of a family camping trip.
“How do you spell Matt?” she’ll ask out loud to the afternoon air, prompted by nothing but her wandering love-drunk mind.

And then, just as quickly as these littles loves have come into our lives, they are wholly replaced by an intense and often obsessive-compulsive crush that starts around Year 8 and renders all prior interests completely redundant.

The celebrity crush.

Sex may involve itself here, though we might not truly understand what that would entail. Perhaps a kiss? But a nice big long one. Mine was the late-90s long-haired drummer Zac Hanson from Christian brotherhood boyband Hanson. I loved him from 1998 until 2000 and I made it official by cutting out every possible photo from every magazine I could get my hands on. I obsessively blu-tacked him to my bedroom walls like I was an alcoholic ex-detective haunted by that one perp who got away.

In my backpack, I carried a permanent texta, just in case I might run into Zac and be given the opportunity to get his signature on my chest, which I would then tattoo over. Why Zac Hanson would ever be walking down the main street of Kiama is beyond me – but to me it seemed hugely likely, due to the undeniable and mutual magnetism between us.

Nowadays, my teenage students have the internet and therefore limitless access to an infinite store of photos, articles, fanfics and tweets about their crush. How they manage to get any climate protesting done is a mystery.
While these celebrity crushes steal months and even years out of our teenage lives, they are also fleeting in the scheme of things. They are soon replaced forever by one’s first and truest in-real-life love – where sex is finally a real thing and doing it with someone is like giving them a really nice compliment, rather than the disgusting act of bodily terrorism it seemed to be before.

It’s where love and admiration and adoration all combine in the perfect ratio and suddenly you’ve forgotten your Grandma’s birthday. And her name. Too busy thinking of ways to inject your special someone into any possible conversation.

I should say, though, that celebrity crushes are often not erased entirely. There’s sometimes a lingering flame. My Aunty’s misguided love for Cliff Richard continues. Mum’s for Adam Ant – whose lock of hair she cut off with scissors after leaping onto the stage at a concert back in 1970-something. These moments are not easily forgotten. A friend of mine was almost dumped by her real-life long-term girlfriend because she could not say for sure that she loved her more than she loved Missy Higgins.

The amount of 30-something-year-old lesbians at a Hanson concert these days is evidence enough of the durability of being totally and completely star-struck. You may change the box you store the feelings in, so to speak, but you never chuck it out completely.

Two things happened to me at age 14 that set me on a certain trajectory. The first – my love of women arrived. And the second – my love for Jamie Oliver. One moment I was fantasising that Jamie and I would roll out the perfect pasta dough together and then, in the next imaginary scene, I was serving the spoils to my beautiful wife. Such has been the script of my life – my partnerships and love affairs all entirely and exclusively homosexual and my celebrity obsessions – all entirely and exclusively hetero.

While most people grow out of a childlike preoccupation with someone they’ve never met – mine have stood the test of time. In my Google history, Jamie Oliver continues to be my top-searched term and I can regularly be found scrolling for new photos of him or his perfect children. The fact that he encourages his young son to wear a skirt is only further evidence that our admiration for each other would no doubt blossom should we ever cross paths in the real world. I would tell him that he’s my only YouTube channel subscription and the only page I follow on Facebook.

“I know,” he’ll say when we finally meet, “you’re more than just a Top Follower, Sian. It’s almost like…we’re the same person?”

Jamie and I are not exclusive, however. There was a Robin Williams phase. And then there was a Ricky Gervais era, though that faded away when he insulted my fantasy next-door neighbour and intergenerational would-be companion and soulmate: Dame Judi Dench.

And now — there’s Richard Glover.

Falling in love with Richard Glover wasn’t so much like being hit by a bus. It was more like being hit by the beautiful voice of a man on the bus, and missing your stop to keep listening. When I started to rush out of work in order to catch his ABC Radio Drive show, I knew something exciting was happening.

There’s the charming way he overlaps his afternoon monologue with the background crescendo of his theme song – signalling the coming news segment so seamlessly, right on the hour. There’s the way he ends a conversation with “Hey Leigh?” as if a question is coming, but then adds “Thank you!” as his quirky way of saying goodbye. I love when he talks about his dog, Clancy. Or how much he loves his wife. I dream of being there when Deb and Clancy come to get him from the train station after a day at work. What I wouldn’t give to be on that moody walk home on a sunny Sydney evening, reminiscing about my all-time favourite Richard Glover radio moment.

“I don’t need to wear a helmet,” one caller boasted during a segment about quad-bike deaths. Glover left a rare silence. A pregnant pause if ever there was.

The caller continued, “I ride quads every day with no worries! And I’d encourage my kids to do the same.”
“Well,” Glover said simply, “you’re a muppet.”
Oh, how we’ll laugh when I bring this up over drinks!
“I don’t think of you as a fan,” he’ll say, “you’re a friend!”

Loving a celebrity gives me comfort somehow. It provides some strange, half-baked fantasy to look forward to – imagine meeting them! Some childish imaginary escape that, like nothing else in life, is totally consequence-free. There’s no risk in wondering and dreaming and imagining what they might think if they knew how great they made your day just by doing their job.

I was at my cousin’s wedding a few years back, keen to celebrate his real-life love of his real-life wife. I barely knew anyone, but a man I had spoken to earlier that evening had re-entered my circle of strangers, obviously back for more of my best anecdotes.

“Well anyway,” I quipped, “that’s what Richard Glover said!”
“Oh my god,” the man exhaled, rolling his wine-glazed eyes, “all this girl ever talks about is Richard bloody Glover!”

The ten-year-old inside me was blushing – embarrassed and exposed. But the 32-year-old stood strong and shrugged. Unfazed, I subtly sidled into another group with the emboldened confidence of someone with a secret little fantasy best friend perched comfortably upon their shoulder.

“He’s a muppet!” the little shoulder-Glover whispered, “and you’re doing great!”