Any person who has spent serious time in a hospital worried about a relative knows the dread of the waiting room. You’re anxious, bored, and melancholic — waiting to hear what the doctor has to say. One mother found an unlikely way to make it bearable, and she’s shared the story with the world. Writing an essay for Newsweek, Kirsten Love says that she had a full-blown crush on her daughters’ doctor. Eventually, it turned into a survival tool across years of appointments, and her husband, Richard, was in on it the entire time. The giveaway was her pre-appointment routine. Love traded her usual ponytail and Chapstick for blown-out hair, pink lipstick and heels she otherwise never bothered with. This prompted her husband to call it out once with a grin. “Getting ready for your doctor crush. Looking good,” he told her, per the essay. She didn’t deny it. Talking about the stakes, Love made it clear that it all started with her daughters’ rare disorders. Her youngest was apparently born more than two months premature. Both girls live with different growth maladies. This turned their respective childhoods into a blur of specialists and tests. She described children’s hospitals as places where you’re all but guaranteed to share an elevator with a gravely ill child, and spot a parent crying alone on a bench. How the crush developed Against that brutal backdrop, she says the crush bloomed into something of a distraction for Love. She singled out one specialist — renowned for treating the rarest growth disorders, and gifted with a warm bedside manner — as the one who tipped her feelings past ordinary gratitude for treating her children. She even admitted that on the hardest days, the doctors “seemed preferable marital substitutes.” They were fellow partners in her kids’ care who never whined about bills or the state of the house. Much of it played out over email. “His name in my inbox was like a text from a lover,” she wrote. During pandemic-era telehealth visits, she went as far as setting up a ring light and staging her dining room to look inviting on camera. Love carried the crush quietly, half-ashamed of it, until another mother in the rare-disease community confessed the exact same feeling. “I think I’m in love with his doctor,” the woman told her. Love recalled nearly hugging her on the spot. Then they started wondering if there’s more to this than they assume. True love or trauma response? The two moms compared notes and worked out why this was happening. Their best theory was that they were converting appointments they dreaded into something closer to a date. Then an Instagram meme reframed the whole thing. Scrolling a slideshow of familiar fear responses — fight, flight, freeze — Love landed on a lesser-known fourth: fawn, defined as courting favor through flattery and deference. She recognized herself immediately. The crush, she realized, was a trauma response, a way of keeping the doctor firmly on her children’s side. She came to view it as a coping mechanism that carried her from grief to acceptance of her daughters’ diagnoses. Love writes that her marriage held through all of it and she described Richard, her husband, as the perfect wingman; a partner who steadied her with confidence. She also iterated that he remains her true, lasting crush, a love that was not rooted in trauma. Her closing thought doubled as the essay’s thesis: “Our marriage survived not despite my doctor crush, but because of it.” Love is writing a memoir, titled Little Girls, about her daughters’ rare growth disorders. Do you think the “doctor crush” is a clever survival tool or a step too far? Share your take in the comments.