6. Sam

This is Sam. Was there ever any question? Everyone wanted him from seventh grade on, and you weren't strong enough to fight something like that. You might have pretended not to care senior year when the alphabet conspired to make you lab partners in physics, maybe you publicly shrugged off the well-known fact that he called you every Sunday afternoon to double-check what the homework had been, but inside you were turning cartwheels and screaming at the top of your lungs. You taught yourself how to wear eyeliner, in case he liked it. You started wearing skirts more. Other boys started to notice (and you noticed them noticing) but never Sam. But then there was the party after graduation, someone's backyard had a bonfire and a keg, and you're pretty sure you were both pretending to be drunker than you really were. One kiss. He tasted like beer and toothpaste. No one saw.

(Image: Chace Crawford (!) by Alexi Lubomirski)

5. Peter

This is Peter. You weren't really looking for anything — definitely not anything serious, anything you'd actually have to put yourself into — which was why you spent that Saturday night sacked out at B&N on a chair near the travel section. He was browsing Europe: Central and Eastern with his back to you and you noticed that you were wearing the same sneakers. You had to say something. Over coffee — then beer — then scotch out of wine glasses back at his place — you realize that you know half a dozen people in common and you go to all the same bars.

For the next two months everything you love gets reinforced: Pancakes without syrup? Check. Fleetwood Mac but not Stevie Nicks? Check. One Hundred Years of Solitude? Check. Costume parties, the Mets, How I Met Your Mother, tacos al pastor? All check. Okay, so he never really knew how to dress. So he peed with the door open, never paid for dinner, and forgot to tell you when he was going up to Vermont for a week. Sometimes people actually do meet in bookstores, and sometimes amazing things come of it. Sometimes it ends quietly, and you're relieved that it's over, but you're also glad you had it in the first place.

(Image via The Mid Wasteland)

4. Douglas

This is Douglas. You knew exactly who he was the minute you saw him on the other side of the basement bar: cheap scotch with a beer back, tattered Kerouac paperbacks, pocketknife, LPs of Leadbelly and Johnny Cash. You weren't actually expecting the motorcycle, but to be fair it was hard to picture him riding the subway or taking a cab. "What are you doing in the city, anyway?" you asked and without a word he took you by the hand and put you on the bike and after two hours you were at his cabin (a pond, a barn he restored himself, a stand of pines to hide his homegrown). Three days later you put your clothes back on and he drove you back home. You figured you'd never see him again. You didn't.

(Image by Mario Sorrenti)

3. Eustacio

This is Eustacio. You woke up at 7:30 a.m. to sign up for that Art History class (a feat all the more impressive considering you only went to sleep at 5, thanks to that party on the other side of the quad) and you still didn't land the section you were hoping for. You showed up for the first day of class and didn't notice him until the professor getstured his way: "This is Eustacio, my teaching assistant. He's here to help you get as much out of this course as you can." It wasn't until after the midterm study session that you were alone together, walking back towards campus breathing the early spring air. You were chattering about Frank Stella and Minimalism and all of a sudden he just kissed you, mid-word, and kept on kissing you. He taught you how to drink beer like a dude, finally, and he didn't laugh at your poetry. He confessed that he truly wanted to be an architect, but he worried the profession was dying.

It ended when summer break came around — he said he had to focus on his dissertation, and you were headed to D.C. for that internship anyway. In the fall, when you got back to campus, you saw him here and there and you'd exchange sly smiles, but nothing ever really came of it.

(Image: Lucien Smith; J. Crew)

2. Rick

This is Rick. He works in finance, and you find it kind of attractive that when he tells that to you he doesn't act apologetic or shrug his shoulders. He buys you a drink without asking what you want, and when he smiles as he hands it over you forget that you don't even like gin. You go on six dates over four weeks before he brings you home, and you're both naked on the ugly black leather couch almost before the door is closed. You run into the bathroom afterwards and mass-text everyone you know, and then wonder if this makes you a bad person. It doesn't — he's doing it too. You break up when his fund sends him to China for a month and you, forgetting him in a drunken haze one night, make out with your ex. Funny, you always thought he'd be the one who couldn't commit.

(Image via GQ)

1. Roland

This is Roland. He likes frozen vodka shots (for which he invents profane rhyming toasts), his mother's fuzzy dogs, and playing vintage video games. You meet a friend's party where he tells you he's 23 (and you believe it) but he's actually only 18, which becomes obvious once you get him in bed. He looks better with his clothes on (skinny chicken-legs never did it for anyone) but he's huge where it counts and can go all night. You break up after two weeks - come on, he's in high school - but he'll love you forever.

(Image via The Sartorialist)