When I was 10 through about 12, I was determined to marry David Cassidy. So were millions of other preteens. We all thought that we, alone, had what David Cassidy needed in a wife. We weren’t sure what that was, but we had it.

I remember reading my Tiger Beat magazine and discovering a contest to meet David. All I had to do was explain why David would want to meet me, personally. I told my mother that I was going to win because I cleverly wrote, “David, you have to meet me because ‘I Think I Love You!'” My mother said she imagined that every young girl was going to use the title of his hit song in their plea to meet their idol. I was stunned. Really? Others would think of this, too? Well, it turns out that they did. And some other girl, who was not me, won that contest.

Teen and preteen crushes are powerful things. They twist up your insides and can bring you to tears. You think that you just cannot live without the object of your infatuation. You learn that love can be physically painful.

And then you move on … to crushes on real people, or older famous people. I worked with a young woman, when we were both in our late-20s, who was determined to meet and marry John F. Kennedy, Jr. It was lucky for her that her dream didn’t pan out.

I moved on to real people in my late teens and 20s … and to Barry Manilow. I was way too old to still have crushes on celebrities, but that didn’t stop me. I listened to his albums day and night. I even exercised to them … and forced my boyfriends to listen to them. I ignored comments from those who said he was gay. How could he be gay? He was going to marry me! Of course, it turned out that he was gay, and he was not going to marry another woman. (He’d been married to a woman in his younger days.)

Speaking of inappropriate crushes, I was in my 50s, and married, when I was infatuated with Robert Pattinson. Looking back, I’d prefer to think that I was infatuated with his Twilight character, Edward Cullen, instead of a young man in his 20s.

But, as they say, I digress. All of this reminiscing started with David Cassidy’s death. He brought many people joy with his music and his show, “The Partridge Family.” Both are firmly entrenched in the memories and psyches of multiple generations; kids born in the 50s, 60s, and maybe the 70s, as well as their parents, watched the show when it originally aired, and then later generations watched it in reruns, when their parents insisted.

Many are saddened by the passing of David Cassidy. Are we mourning the death of our youth, blah, blah, blah? No. We’re mourning the loss of David Cassidy.

Why? Because we think we love him.