Do you remember, as a kid, watching your favorite cartoon and realizing that you were focusing a little too much on one of the characters? Lots of the characters were great, but there was one in particular who was so smart, so cool, so good at vanquishing bad guys.

You probably didnt tell anyone at the time, but you had a crush. And it was on a fictional and perhaps non-human cartoon character.

The tiny torches of love you carried might now seem like an embarrassing, aberrant blip on your path to adulthood. But after surveying The Huffington Post offices, we can safely say youre not alone. Lots and lots of us had cartoon crushes.

Whats more, having those nascent infatuations is totally normal. It happens all the time. Kids have crushes on comic book characters, and why shouldnt they? said Amy Lang, a parenting and sexuality expert and the founder of Birds+Bees+Kids, a Seattle organization that helps parents talk to children about sex. Lang said that kids crushes on cartoon characters are a natural extension of imagination-based play that permeates so much of young development.

Kids' imaginations can take them to places that adults cant go, Lang said. Maybe we [adults] feel weird about the fact that we have a crush on Spider-Man, but kids dont have those filters.

Watching fictional relationships on screen can help young people form social ideas as they grow and test out romantic ideas in a safe way, too. My first crush was on Mighty Mouse, and I remember fantasizing being that little mouse tied up on the railroad tracks and that he would swoop down and save me, said Sharon Lamb, professor of counseling psychology at the University of Massachusetts.

But Lamb said that can be part of the problem, too. If our cartoons enforce stereotypical gender roles early on, theyre hard to get rid of later in life.

It wasnt very good for me to have these fantasies of being a helpless victim all the time, even if its a mouse, right? Lamb said. I think these early crushes do sort of orient you to culture I think they teach you norms, cultural norms of attractiveness and sexuality.

Thats not the childs fault, but it does mean that the men and women in charge of the cartoons children watch should feel a responsibility to accurately reflect the society we live in. Lets get [children] a variety of kinds of cartoon characters to have crushes on, instead of big, bulky he-men and victim girls and women, she said. Instead, they should see characters of all sizes and ethnicities and races and relationships.

The more [kids] have a variety of cartoon characters, the better off everyone is, because I think that were made physically and psychologically to be attracted to a variety of kinds of people.

For many of us, that includes a cartoon character or two, and thats just fine. Seriously, just look at who we were attracted to as kids.