Is National Crush Day a public holiday?

No. It is an unofficial internet observance with no law or proclamation behind it, so offices, banks, and schools stay open.

Is National Crush Day the same as National Crush a Can Day?

No. National Crush a Can Day is a recycling observance that happens to fall on the same September 27 date. This crush day is about romantic crushes, not aluminum cans.

How is National Crush Day different from Valentine's Day?

Valentine's Day celebrates established love and relationships. National Crush Day is about the earlier, uncertain, often one-sided stage of attraction.

How do you celebrate National Crush Day?

People acknowledge or confess a crush, send a message, or post an anonymous tribute, often using the hashtag NationalCrushDay.

Where does the word 'crush' come from?

The romantic sense is first recorded in an 1884 diary, and the phrase 'to have a crush on' appears by 1903. It likely grew out of the older slang word 'mash.'

Is having a crush actually backed by science?

Yes. Brain scans link early attraction to the dopamine reward system, and the obsessive version was named 'limerence' by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979.

844 saved#21 of 6,224

National Crush Day

A social observance on September 27 encouraging people to acknowledge, confess, or celebrate a romantic crush.

Sunday

September 2026

Last updated March 19, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar Team

Have an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATESeptember 27

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYRelationships

SUBCATEGORYRomance

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

~2007

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A confession day with no author.

National Crush Day has no documented founder, proclamation, or sponsoring organization. The earliest traceable online mentions appeared around 2007, as social media made it easy to spread date-pegged observances, and it is sustained today entirely by hashtag waves each September 27.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

The day a one-sided feeling gets its moment

PHOTO

English had no casual word for the helpless, hopeful ache of liking someone until a teenager reached for one. In 1884, a young woman in Cairo, Illinois, named Maud Rittenhouse wrote in her diary, "Wintie is weeping because her crush is gone." It is the first known time anyone used crush to mean a person you are quietly stuck on. National Crush Day, every September 27, is a holiday for that exact feeling.

The word was new, but the experience it named is old and built into the brain. Modern scans show that early attraction runs on dopamine, the same reward chemistry behind craving and motivation. A crush is not just a mood. It is a measurable neurological event, and a short-lived one.

One note before the confessions start. September 27 is shared by a completely different observance, National Crush a Can Day, which is about recycling aluminum, not romance. This page is about the other crush.

ORIGINS

National Crush Day history

INTRODUCTION

The feeling came first, by thousands of years. People have written about doomed, dizzy, one-sided longing since the earliest love poetry. What took a surprisingly long time to arrive was a casual, everyday word for it.

That word landed in pieces. The noun shows up in 1884, but the fuller phrase most people use now, "to have a crush on" someone, is not recorded until 1903, almost two decades later. The idea needed a name before it needed a grammar.

CHAPTER 01

A teenager names a feeling

Rittenhouse was not a poet or a linguist. She was a girl who kept a detailed diary from age 16, recording the social life of a small Mississippi River town. The line about a weeping friend whose crush had left was an offhand bit of gossip, not an attempt to coin anything.

She grew up to be someone history noticed for other reasons. After marrying and moving east to Brooklyn, Rittenhouse became an outspoken figure in the women's suffrage movement. The word she dropped into a diary at sixteen outlived everything else she recorded that year.

CHAPTER 02

Borrowed from a "masher"

"Crush" did not appear from nowhere. By the 1870s, slang already had "mash": a "masher" was a lady-killer, and to be "mashed" was to be head over heels. Etymologists treat "crush" as the snappier, sturdier cousin of that older word.

Almost a century later, in 1979, the psychologist Dorothy Tennov gave the experience a clinical name in her book Love and Limerence. She called it limerence: an involuntary, intrusive state of longing she built from thousands of questionnaires. The crush had gone from gossip to slang to a subject of science.

CHAPTER 03

A holiday with no founder

The day itself is the youngest and thinnest part of the story. No founder, proclamation, or organization is on record for National Crush Day. The earliest traceable online mentions appear around 2007, when social media turned date-pegged observances into easy, shareable rituals.

That is the honest origin: not a decree but a habit. Each September 27, the date alone does the work, prompting a fresh round of confessions, hints, and tributes. A word a teenager wrote down in 1884 now has a day, and the day belongs to no one in particular.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Crush Day

SCIENCE

A crush is wired into the same circuits as reward and craving.

A 2005 fMRI study of people newly in love found activity in the dopamine-rich ventral tegmental area and caudate nucleus, the same circuitry behind craving and motivation. That is why a crush can feel less like a choice and more like a pull you cannot switch off.

PREVALENCE

Being the only one who feels it is the norm

Among young people, one-sided attraction is far more common than the mutual kind, so an unanswered crush is statistically ordinary rather than a personal failure. A day built around acknowledging a crush quietly normalizes the most universal version of it.

PSYCHOLOGY

Saying it out loud has a measurable upside

A 2007 UCLA study led by Matthew Lieberman found that putting a feeling into words, called affect labeling, reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm center. The simple act of naming a crush can take some of the charge out of it.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Crush Day by the Numbers

1884: Word first recorded
12-18 mo: Intense love can last
~4x: Unrequited more common than mutual
~98%: Have known unrequited love

TIMELINE

Timeline

The word is first recorded

Maud Rittenhouse uses 'crush' romantically in her diary, the earliest known example.

'Have a crush on' appears

The fuller phrasing enters the written record nearly two decades after the noun.

Tennov names 'limerence'

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coins a clinical term for obsessive crush-longing in her book.

A crush is mapped in the brain

An fMRI study links early-stage love to the brain's dopamine reward pathways.

The day surfaces online

The earliest traceable mentions of National Crush Day appear as social media spreads.

Unrequited love quantified

Researchers find one-sided love roughly four times more frequent than the mutual kind.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Crush Day

The noun beat the phrase by 19 years

'Crush' as a person you fancy is recorded in 1884, but 'to have a crush on' someone is not written down until 1903.

A crush can dent your serotonin

In the obsessive state Tennov called limerence, serotonin can drop to levels seen in obsessive-compulsive disorder, which helps explain the intrusive, can't-stop-thinking-about-them loop.

The diarist became a suffrage figure

Maud Rittenhouse, who first wrote the word down at sixteen, later became an outspoken voice in the women's suffrage movement.

The holiday has no organizer at all

There is no founder, sponsor, or committee behind National Crush Day. It runs entirely on the date and a hashtag each September 27.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Crush Day

Send the message you keep drafting

Use the day as cover to finally say something to your crush, even something small. Research on naming feelings suggests putting it into words can ease the anxiety, not add to it.

KEEP

Keep it low-stakes and kind

A crush is uncertain by nature, so aim for a light, honest note rather than a grand declaration. The point of the day is acknowledgment, not pressure on anyone.

POST

Post an anonymous shout-out

Join the #NationalCrushDay wave with an anonymous or no-names tribute. It is the most common way the day actually plays out online.

APPRECIATE

Appreciate a friend crush too

Crushes are not only romantic; a 'girl crush' or admiration for someone's talent counts. Tell a friend or mentor you think they are great.

LEARN

Learn the science behind the feeling

Read up on limerence and the dopamine response that drives early attraction. Understanding the brain chemistry makes the whole roller-coaster less mystifying.

Test your knowledge