I’M IN love with James McAvoy.

Okay, not really “in love” in love, but I feel for him that peculiar affection that one can only have for celebrities.

What, you don’t know who James McAvoy is? He starred as Keira Knightley’s lover in Atonement and opposite Forest Whitaker in the excellent Last King Of Scotland, for which my boy James was sadly overshadowed by Whitaker’s Oscar hype.

I know such girlish sentiment leaves me wide open to ridicule, but I confess this to illustrate a point: Everyone has a secret  celebrity crush.

Don’t tell me you’ve never had one. Honestly, it’s an acceptable but little-talked-about phenomenon that is of little threat to real-life relationships.

Usually.

I mentioned to my boyfriend, for example, a possible phone interview with Kristin Kreuk, the half-Asian cutie from TV’s Smallville and the star of the upcoming flick Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li.

He immediately replied: “Man, I like her!!!” (the three exclamation marks were in the original SMS), and then explained
how he and his university roommate would watch Smallville episodes “religiously” to “drool over her”.

If McAvoy or Kreuk weren’t faraway celebrities, you can bet that my boyfriend and I would not be nearly so openly in lust.

Instead, I find myself wishing the interview with the droolworthy Kreuk could be face-toface, just so I could see the joy on  my boyfriend’s face when I pass him her autograph.

I wonder, though, if it’s just as harmless when we’re talking about crushes on local celebrities who, by their sheer  proximity, are more real and accessible than an international star?

A former boyfriend, for example, once took me to see The Observatory perform. To this day, they remain my favourite Singapore band, even though my ex nursed a long-held torch for Vivian Wang, the band’s keyboardist and vocalist.

His crush was so extreme that he gushed about her throughout the concert, even waxing lyrical about her T-shirt, which was emblazoned with a cat graphic. “Meow, meow,” he’d say, seemingly hypnotised.

You’d think I’d be jealous seeing my man reduced to pitiful animal sounds at the sight of another woman. Perhaps it was the cute way in which he dissolved into teeny-bopper fandom, but I merely suggested we go up to talk to her after the concert.

He baulked at the idea, and when I jokingly said I would introduce us by saying “My boyfriend has a crush on you”, he grew even more embarrassed.

Not all the people I know respond with amusement rather than jealousy. I have one friend, for example, who wouldn’t even
let her boyfriend surf for photos of his celebrity crush without her present at the computer to cast a watchful eye.

Perhaps I should ask my boyfriend if he is threatened by my by-now-not-so-secret celebrity crush on James McAvoy. I don’t know. I’ll find out when he reads today’s issue of my paper.

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The writer is a Chinese-American freelance writer and former Straits Times journalist based in San Francisco and Singapore.