I've read a few where the first crush is portrayed as almost disruptive. The character has their life, their plans, their identity neatly sorted, and then this person walks in and scrambles the code. It's less about gentle discovery and more about an insistent, inconvenient truth that won't be ignored. The narrative focuses on the resistance, the attempts to rationalize it away, and the ultimate surrender to the feeling. This angle is great for character-driven plots where the main conflict is internal, and the love interest is just...unapologetically themselves, acting as the catalyst.