This one's just me, no guest — the first in a new monthly series where I crawl back through my own messy dating history and report what I found. Consider this me stepping out from behind the host chair and onto the stage, banana hammocks and all.

We're going back to the summer of 2005, my first field hockey preseason at Oberlin — a tiny, gloriously weird liberal arts school in Ohio where the cool kids were sad art boys and the soccer team had just come back from Brazil with a luggage full of bad decisions. Enter Mr. Ken Doll: 6'3", Calvin Klein face, pre-med major, artist parents, a Soho loft, and absolutely zero intention of ever dating me. Naturally, I was obsessed.

I get into the full arc — the shirtless pickup soccer game that broke my brain, the talent show I will never psychologically recover from, the art history class plot twi ...