My desirability peaked somewhere around 9th grade. I had a pretty good run in elementary school as the hot guy that all the girls wanted, tailed off a bit in middle school, and then blew up in ninth grade. I was going through my “punk” phase and had blue hair and spikes in my Chuck Taylor’s and tee shirts from Hot Topic. I’m sure I looked like an idiot but I guess I made an impression when I first walked through the door. Plenty of girls, and even a guy or two, took notice. At the end of 10th grade I settled down with one girl and basically ceased to exist to any others until I resurfaced at some point in college.

I think it’s pretty interesting, looking at who’s hot and who’s not at different stages of life. It’s easy to break it down for girls. If you were hot, guys wanted you, and if you weren’t, then they didn’t. Pretty simple. It hasn’t been so easy for guys.

In elementary school, I have very little knowledge on what made certain guys more attractive than others. I guess if you weren’t disfigured and you were fairly popular, then there would probably be a couple of girls that liked you.

Another thing I remember is that back then, tall was bad. If you look back at your old class photos and look at the kids in the back row, I guarantee those guys weren’t getting any love. Also, being in the “advanced” reading group was definitely a big help with the ladies.

Middle school was all about rebelling and basically being a huge pain in the ass. That’s when the distinction between nerd and cool became a little stronger, and being the teacher’s pet no longer got you popularity points. This was the beginning of the “liking older guys,” movement. I remember the kid that every girl at my middle school wanted to hook up with. He was like 16 when we were all in eighth grade; he had been held back for truancy or murder or something.

Here we all were, fresh faced 13 and 14 year olds, and this guy comes in smoking cigarettes, getting drunk in homeroom, and fighting anyone who looked at him the wrong way. One time he offered to take a bunch of girls on a joyride in his dad’s car, which he crashed into a telephone pole a few blocks from his house.

There was another guy who used to hang around and get a lot of attention from the girls. I say hang around because he didn’t actually go to our school. Every day he would ride over on his goofy little roller blades from whatever high school he went to so that he could hit on 14 year old girls and show off his beeper. Then he would blade off into the sunset before his shift at Giant started. The girls loved him at first, but eventually (with a lot of help from me and my friends) they realized he was a tool and he was shunned.

When we got to high school, it was like someone had hit the reset button. The girls we went to middle school with were all sick of us by this point and now there were eighteen year olds with cars and alcohol to hang out with. I mean, I had awesome blue hair and super cool Hot Topic tee shirts but even I couldn’t compete with that. I’m convinced that high school dating was pure chaos. There was no rhyme or reason to anything; all of the most random couples I’ve known hooked up in high school because they got detention together once or both listened to The Aquabats or something. No one ever knew how people got together, it just happened one day and became accepted as fact the next.

Good news is that everyone has a shot at love in college, depending on how high their standards are. Dating in college is, generally, even more chaotic than it was in high school, though. People still get together for really stupid reasons (alcohol), but instead of turning one commonality into a three year relationship, they just make out or have sex. It’s more efficient, but it also makes campus way more incestuous than your typical high school.

After a few years of playing Six Degrees of Evan’s Bacon, I’m curious to see what dating is like after college. I should probably get started on my eHarmony compatibility survey.