Class Crushes Never Work Out

Two years ago, there was a guy in my history class who I called “The Rockstar.” He wore leather jackets and a necklace and ripped jeans, and slouched with his legs wide open like Danny Zuko. In all reality, he was actually skinny, nerdy and almost girlish, but there in that classroom, he seemed like a hot commodity.

I’m not a particularly aggressive flirt, nor am I the kind of girl who falls for every guy she meets. For the most part, my lack of unrealistic fairytale expectations make me borderline cynical. But class crushes, damn, I have a tendency to fall victim to the illusion that they just might work out.

Crushing on the shaggy-haired guy with the messenger bag is about as cliched and unrealistic a figment of the collegiate American psyche as the nerdy guy tutoring the pretty girl and the two of them falling in love. It ain’t gonna work out, ladies and gentlemen.

At the very end of the year, before summer vacation, The Rockstar and I happened to be at the same party. Fate, it seemed. Or at least novelty. Because it felt so fateful in my eyes, we flirted it up and ending up sharing a short kiss at the end of the night. I honestly remember nothing we spoke about, except I think I was bored. He kissed like a girl. We shared a taxi home with some other friends and I casually waved bye.

As it turned out, I had fallen victim to too many viewings of 10 Things I Hate About You. I was actually excited with myself, not so much because I liked the guy (after all, he really did kiss like a girl), but because the novelty of making out with your class crush on the last day of classes is cinematic and it’s a good story. I think I saw him one other time and we just said hi.

While most of my class crushes remained unrequited and in my own mind, one other was realized. On this occasion, the guy was in fact undeniably handsome, which my friends in class certainly agreed with. When I happened to run into the handsome gentleman at a bar on campus, we said hello and started talking about the class. I’m all for discussing common ground, but dude wanted to talk about the teacher and about class presentations. He walked me home, and we hugged, and it was awful and cringe-worthy and I hate to think of it years later. Quickly, things went downhill fast. The next week, he brought his Mom to class. The week after that, another girl in the class told me she had previously dated him. And the week following that, we got assigned to a project together.

I was reminded of the pitfalls of such collegiate illusions of grandeur when I read a New York Times Modern Love column about a woman who imagines falling in love with a scrappy guy as they take a vow of silence on her meditation retreat. They end up having eye sex and ditching the retreat early, only to realize that they are far from compatible, forcing them to return to the retreat and silently avoid each other for the remaining hours.

In college, you’re going to have to avoid him for the rest of the semester. Kissing the boy from class is a mistake.

[Photo via Thinkstock]