I don’t trust people who marry their high-school sweethearts.

It’s not a sweet childhood romance; it’s disturbing and a bad idea. If you marry your high-school sweetheart and still claim to be happy years later, it means neither one of you has changed significantly since high school.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be tied down to any life decisions I made during a period of my life when taking out the trash was a punishment for not making my bed as opposed to a normal adult activity.

“Happy anniversary, sweetheart! I still love you just as much as I did when I first laid eyes on you, back before I’d ever driven on the highway alone or had my own bank account!”

My own high-school sweetheart was a Jehovah’s Witness skater boy named Mark. He picked me up after church and took me to Shepard Fairey’s half pipe in a damp factory in Providence. Mark left me alone with a dreadlocked albino and his filthy yellow dog while he and his brother failed to land a single kick flip.

OBEY didn’t exist yet, but there were “Andre the Giant Had a Posse” stickers pasted up on telephone poles all around the city. Who knew that 20 years later, this very same factory would house a magical golden monkey named “Fepard Shairey” who shits $1,000 bills and answers only to the voice of Barack Obama? But I digress.

The point is that I was an idiot. I had terrible taste in boys and no concept of what a relationship was. I dated Mark because he made a mix tape, wrote me love notes, and wanted to buy me cat’s-eye sunglasses. I didn’t want a boyfriend, I wanted a gal pal.

The criteria for the quintessential impractical teenage girl crush are as follows. A man must be:

1. Non-threatening
2. Incompetent
3. Obsessive to the point of stalking
4. Have a childlike fascination with something useless (like trains or astronomy)
5. Have girlish features (high cheekbones, no body hair)
6. Dress gay

With these six points in place, I don’t think I would be out of line to say that every girl under 16 is a secret lesbian. Girls want to love someone who can’t love them back, someone they have to take care of. They want the underdog, the nerd, the drifter, the mysterious stranger. They want to save and fix and coddle, and in return, they expect obsessive, 24-hour love and attention.

Basically, girls want a doll, or a baby, or a cat to put in a bonnet. At 16, it becomes a doll with a dick. But not much else has changed.

Here are five manchildren I wanted to make magazine collages with while listening to The Cure and eating chocolate-covered cherries.

CHRISTIAN SLATER IN UNTAMED HEART

Untamed Heart is a completely re-fucking-tarded movie about a drifter/orphan with an implanted baboon heart who falls in love with Marisa Tomei and then dies in her car. Whoops, spoiler alert. He dies! Sweet Jesus, did I love him.

In the above unintentionally hilarious clip, a very flat-chested Marissa Tomei combs Christian Slater’s wet hair for two whole minutes while he stares at her rack and talks about how he pushes people away. Red flags, but she thinks it is cute! Fast-forward to 2:20 to see him cop the most awkward titty grab this side of a newborn kangaroo. I cannot stress enough how long she spends combing his hair.

Eventually, they take off their 90s jeans to have sex, but instead of getting a boner, he weeps in her arms while she rocks him back and forth like a fucking newborn baby. Then she says the most unhealthy words ever uttered in the history of film: “I’m going to fall in love with you, but YOU DON’T HAVE TO LOVE ME BACK.” No, Marisa Tomei, no!

Untamed Heart is a terrible message about love wrapped inside terrible dialogue delivered by terrible actors. I was smitten.

Incompetent Man-Child Rating:
Nonthreatening—9 /10 (Baboon heart prevents much physical action)
Incompetent—6/10 (Saves her from a rape, but is stabbed in the process)
Obsessive to the point of stalking—10/10 (He watches her sleep. He watches her sleep!!)
Childlike fascination with something—?/10 (Don’t remember and won’t watch again)
Girlish features, very little body hair—4 /10 (Has some chest hair since he is 24, after all)
Dresses gay—N/A (Barely can dress himself due to severe mental retardation/baboon features)

JOHN CRYER IN PRETTY IN PINK

Duckie is what every teenage girl wants, the quirky nice guy who understands you without you having to say a word and also wears bolo ties! Duckie lip-syncs to classic blues records, has a fabulous Flock of Seagulls-meets-Danzig pompadour, and would do anything in the world for Andie. I loved him because he was artsy, but in retrospect, my gaydar was highly underdeveloped. Ducky obviously likes penises.

“I live to like you!” Duckie says to Andy, which is disturbing, and should not be considered a good thing by anyone’s standards. But to a virginal teenager, ego-stroking and obsessive pining is exactly what makes a man attractive. Little did we know that once our parents stopped paying our rent, a man who follows you around town and says things like “I would have died for you” is when you call the police.

Duckie is a classic character, but in reality, he’d be a pretty awful boyfriend. Let’s be honest—he probably cries every time you go to the bathroom.

Incompetent Man-Child Rating:
Nonthreatening—4/10 (See: Duckie Takes a Stand wherein Duckie tries to beat up a 49-year-old James Spader in order to stop him from appearing in Crash.)
Incompetent—5/10 (Actually has a day job, even if he does seem to work during school hours)
Obsessive to the point of stalking—9/10 (Yeah, it’s pretty much the plot of the movie)
Childlike fascination—4/10 (Bolo ties, Otis Redding)
Girlish features—10/10 (Looks exactly like Jon Cryer, but even younger.)
Dresses gay—9/10 (Brian Setzer swallowed a hipster and shat out Duckie.)

JULIAN SANDS IN ROOM WITH A VIEW

Fucking hell, I loved this movie and I loved Julian Sands in this movie but the whole thing is a box of shit. I loved it because Julian is blond and obsessed with Helena Bonham Carter and because there was Victorian shit all over the Victorian screen, and there was also opera involved (very grown up, OK?).

Helena Bonham Carter can’t be with Julian Sands because she loves him, of course. Meanwhile, she is engaged to Cecil (Daniel Day-Lewis) but can’t admit she doesn’t love him because then there would be no story. Also, considering the trajectory of Daniel Day-Lewis’s career as opposed to Julian Sands‘s, she made the wrong choice.

But Julian really loves her, and as such, he has to convince her to love him back because that is what normal, healthy people do. So Julian pleads with Helena in this manipulative fashion not to marry Cecil:

“He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.”

So Helena decides that she must immediately go to Italy to escape him. Like you do.

The story is awful, and the characters are just melted neurotic piles of teatime and goo. In retrospect, what I thought was romantic (to push away your true love and force him to chase you like a little boy with Down syndrome giving away free hugs) is actually really obnoxious.

In the above clip, Julian Sands has a “creed” (Beauty, Joy, Love) which he repeats from up in a tree as his enabling father explains it means “the eternal yes.” I don’t know, either. These people don’t have jobs.

Anyway, it kind of makes sense that E.M. Forster was homosexual, because this story is super-gay.

Incompetent Man-Child Rating:
Nonthreatening—10/10 (Is Victorian)
Incompetent—9/10 (Not sure if he really does anything or even has a job)
Obsessive to the point of stalking—8/10 (The title of the movie is Room With a View, AKA an empty room with no curtains for stalking you and watching you undress.)
Childlike fascination—6/10 (He makes question marks out of the food on his plate—don’t ask.)
Girlish features, very little body hair—8/10 (His pubic hair is as blond and fine as a newborn baby’s.)
Dresses gay—10/10 (See also: Is Victorian)

JOHNNY DEPP AS EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

Edward Scissorhands is the quintessential art-schoolgirl crush. He toddles about like a newborn Goth, terrifyingly wide-eyed. He is completely incapable of taking care of himself. Edward Scissorhands is everything a girl with no self-esteem wants in a boyfriend: a useless ghost pet! He can’t really manipulate the landscape of reality due to the fact that he doesn’t have hands. That’s where the ladies come in.

In all of the bedlam, Edward somehow manages to accrue enough funds for a bitchin’ leather cat suit. How is he getting his money for his clubbing outfits, since he cuts everyone’s hair for free? If he’s like every other Goth, he gets it from his parents. But this Goth is different; his parents are dead. And so there are unexplained plot holes.

Look, a straitjacket alone is almost $250.

Unfortunately for most Goths, Edward is capable of sending you into PTSD panic attack if you’ve ever been raped at knifepoint. That leaves a small minority who are ready to open their hearts to a useless zombie with no capacity for hatred or anger. And they are all pictured dancing in the above video.

Incompetent Man-Child Rating:
Nonthreatening—10/10 (Is Edward Scissorhands)
Incompetent—10/10 (Is Edward Scissorhands)
Obsessive to the point of stalking—10/10 (Is Edward Scissorhands)
Childlike fascination—10/10 (Hands made of scissors)
Girlish features, very little body hair—10/10 (Is Johnny Depp)
Dresses gay—10/10 (Is Edward Scissorhands)

THOMAS DOLBY

Steampunk-styled computer nerd musician with sexy lips. OK, I can’t really disagree with this one. Sometimes you get something right.

—KYRIA ABRAHAMS

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