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Sex

Every Single One of Your Terrible Crushes, Explained With Instant Noodles

Falling for a Supermie? Hope you like hearing about their band. A lot.
Illustrations by Diedra Cavina

Crushes are beautiful. They're almost as beautiful as seeing that aisle of instant noodles at the supermarket when it's the end of the month and your bank account has less digits than your ATM pin. But crushes can be annoying as well, especially when it's unrequited. That's like preparing a bowl of satisfying instant noodles when you're getting ready to binge-watch the Netflix only to discover that the seasoning packets are missing.

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Why do I keep talking about instant noodles and crushes? Because after more than two decades of both I've figured out that they are pretty similar. Think about it. When you can't sleep at night, what do you think about? Crushes and instant noodles. And, just like love interests, not all instant noodles are created the same. We're all going to eat and date a lot of instant noodles before we find the right one. So here's everyone you're going to crush on (or date) in your 20s, described as instant noodles. And take my word for it, avoid that Tupperware of cold mie goreng at all costs.

SAMYANG, THE KOREAN NOODLES YOU SEE IN MUKBANG VIDEOS

Samyang crushes are the kinds of people whose Instagrams alone are enough to make most people melt. Their feed is as color-coordinated as Wes Anderson's bedroom and probably just as curated. If they're a guy, you won't find any gym shots in there, regardless of the strength of his Crossfit abs. Instead, they upload photos of nature and travel shots.

If your crush is a woman, she probably has an Opening Ceremony fanny pack and posts about buying tickets for this year's Summer Sonic Festival.

Social media perfection aside, their personality in real life is pretty complicated. They're difficult to understand, about as difficult as cooking a bowl of Samyang noodles—which, if you want to do it right, need to be half-cooked, drained of water, and then boiled again with all the seasonings to soak up the flavor.

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When you're out with them, these Samyang crushes will ask you to take "candids" of them everywhere you go. They will post up in the corner of the cafe and pretend to read a book, or ask you to snap a shot (or six) of them as they cross an iconic road. Whenever they want to look really candid, they will pose with one of their hands in their pocket.

It will end once you get sick of feeling like their personal photographer, instead of their boyfriend or girlfriend.

SUPERMIE KALDU AYAM

Every Supermie starts almost all of their sentences like this: "One time, I was… " or "When I was traveling in… " They tend to think that they're the first person to try everything. They truly believe that they are different, and they want to attract you by acting like they're one of the cool kids.

But, in reality, they aren't. It's best to just face reality before it's too late—your Supermie crush is way too self-centered to be relationship material. They don't actually give a shit about your day, not when all they really want is someone to listen to them talk about their shoegaze band on that one time they were hiking a volcano when it was about to erupt or some dramatic shit like that.

Sure, Supermie is nice to look at, but you're going to get annoyed with them pretty fast. And when one of these Supermie asks you if you want to hook up, just say pass. They're definitely not going to care about your orgasm. You're just another conquest, the start of another story. Yeah. No thanks. Bye.

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THE INDOMIE YOU BUY WHEN YOU’RE ABROAD

You know how when you're abroad, the cooking instructions on the Indomie packages are sometimes written in English? Or Arabic? Yeah, it's basically the same thing with the Indomie Exports crush. These are the people on Tinder with names like Putri or Dimas who say hi to you in English or some other foreign language. They probably went to some obscure school in the United States or Europe, and definitely paid that tuition without a scholarship. Not only are they Western educated, their elementary school back home was all in English too.

Since they're so whitewashed, they think it's totally fine to throw around the N-word casually. They call their white friends "homies," and justify their TMI posts on social media as their "freedom of expression."

When you're crushing on an Indomie Exports, make sure you speak English 100 percent of the time, or, at the very least, code-switch constantly. Just start a sentence in English and then slide back into Indonesian and end it with an English exclamation like, "I was like, 'Oh, My God!'"

Be constantly aware of your grammar, because they're not going to tolerate your grammatical mistakes. They'll even pretend they forgot how to speak Indonesian, despite the fact that they only spent six to twelve months abroad. Trust me, these Indomie Exports make for a fine crush, but little else.

ANAK MAS

Anak Mas are literally the "golden children," of Indonesia. That means they come from Old Money. New Order money. The kind of money that means a house in Menteng and a grandparent or uncle who was was tight with Suharto. They're basically trust fund babies, and they live in a very rarified air. That makes it hard to get close to an Anak Mas. They hang out with other rich kids, the kids they grew up with at their rich kid schools. You can usually find them all clumped together at whatever club has a famous foreign DJ that weekend.

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But here's the thing, Anak Mas can be really kind—and also a bit naive. They're typically really bad at finding leeches, and they can rarely tell when they're being taken advantage of by their broke-as-fuck, but "edgier," friends. (Basically, you.)

Money was never an issue for an Anak Mas, so you bet they went to school in some faraway country. But all that education doesn't always mean they are smart. And the easiest way to spot their privilege is to just start talking about Indonesian history. They will almost always say, "Wasn't it so much better back in the Suharto days?" Yeah, I'm sure it was great for your dad. But what about the rest of us?

It's pretty hard to hold a real conversation with an Anak Mas. But they will take you out to nice dinners, so there will be plenty of drinks and good food to hold your attention anyway. Who needs to talk?

COLD MIE GORENG IN TUPPERWARE

These crushers were usually involved in some kind of right-wing student coalition back in college. They're almost always wearing these ugly hiking sandals and, just like mie goreng, you can find them almost everywhere. Once they get older, they typically join a political party and then become a politician-cum-Twitter celebrity.

If your crush is a guy, he might be a misogynist and a mansplainer who loves their birds or Betta fish. The best way to describe them is cold mie goreng Indomie in a Tupperware container, because no matter how much you try to educate them on social justice issues, they refuse to budge. And, of course, they love their moms.