I was reading a funny essay in a book I bought at the library for five cents. Don’t let the price fool you; it’s a pretty great book: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, by Chuck Klosterman. Even though he’s the kind of bored and ironic hipster whose outlook on life I don’t particularly share (he often uses the word “unironically” as a condescending dig, as in: “she said unironically that Green Day is the bee’s knees,” not an actual quote), he nevertheless is about the same age as I am, so many of his cultural references refer to things I’m familiar with.

This essay was about the 80s movie Say Anything, in which John Cusack plays a lovable loser, named Lloyd Dobler, who dates the brainy and beautiful school valedictorian. In the movie, everyone asks her what she’s doing with a guy like him, but to the audience it’s obvious that Lloyd is the perfect boyfriend: incredibly sweet, funny, a little edgy and unpredictable, smart, earnest, and endlessly adoring. Klosterman’s complaint is that Lloyd ruined it for all guys of his generation: their girlfriends expected each one of them to measure up to Lloyd. Which only made me think: you know what? My boyfriends, including my current sweetie, were and are Lloyd Dobler.

My high school beau was a major nerd. This was at boarding school ,and you kind of had to be just to get in. Plus, boys were required to wear coats and ties, which could make anyone look nerdy, especially in the age of corduroy and wide neckties, but he completed the picture with bottle-thick, wire-rimmed aviator glasses and sensible shoes. Plus he laughed by snorting through his nose and punctuated his incredibly pedantic, and constant, pronouncements by officiously raising his index finger. But was he ever sweet to me…. Once when I was feeling sick he happened to stop by the dorm, and I leapt out of bed to throw my arms around him (he had to stand in the doorway because boys weren’t allowed in girls’ rooms), and the girl from next door — who spoke in a brash New York accent and wore tight sweaters with no bra, and who had taken it as her mission to make me hip (failing badly of course) — was astonished. She said, “Wow, you actually really like Russell!” See what I mean? Lloyd Dobler.

When I first met Bill in my first year at college he still played Dungeons and Dragons. And he looked like a boy who played D & D: skinny, goofy glasses, a silly little mustache. We were at art school, so he also had an eccentric, creative flair, but it was endearingly nerdy too: he wore thrift store tuxedo shirts with ruffles, in pastel colors, a velvet smoking jacket, and sneakers he had spray-painted chrome; he loved collecting dumpstered and found treasures like small black-rubber objects shed by cars, a huge motorcycle fender, and a broken down electric piano, all of which furnished the apartment; and his car was a 1962 Dodge Dart he had painted first purple, then with giant vegetables, and then a dull green with darker green stripes to look like a zucchini. My point? Oddball on the outside, but you’ll never meet a smarter, kinder, more honest or trustworthy person. We were together for fourteen years. He’s now a somewhat famous and very good artist, and we’re still very close friends.

Mike, my current sweetie, has a penchant for never being on time, promising to finish projects that never get done, and wearing layers of holey T-shirts that are easily over twenty years old with pants that don’t stay up, making him look more like, uh, a plumber than a carpenter. He is so guileless and optimistic it’s maddening to watch him spin impossible fairy tales for himself, and so impractical I actually worry for his safety at times. When he sliced his thumb open on a table saw at a job site in Manhattan, where he was working late by himself, he called me on Staten Island to ask if he should go to the hospital. He was considering coming home instead, with his thumb just about hanging by a thread. Sometimes I just want to run to him, with lunch money and wool mittens. (Even though I begged him to take a cab to the hospital, he took the subway. On his way, some foreign tourists asked him for directions. Then they noticed the blood on his shirt and told him he should be going to the hospital!) Again: maybe not a promising exterior, but on the interior is the sweetest, most good-hearted, most loving man in the world. Plus smart, principled, honest, and without an ounce of self-interest or greed. (And a big strong sexy man, I might add….)

I don’t know if the characters on a show like Sex and the City, who are always looking for a man and always falling short, exist in real life, since I have never met anyone quite like them, but if they do, they would probably look right past the Lloyd Doblers of the world: too weird or frumpy, or too unsuccessful.

There are so many stereotypes, all over the place, that say men are this and men are that. They say relationships are complicated and fraught with misunderstandings and recriminations, and plagued by the constant need for compromise. That hasn’t been my experience, and I don’t think it’s because I’m so great; I think it’s because I’m socially retarded. I don’t play games because I wouldn’t even remotely know how.

I think it’s much more difficult to navigate casual friendships than romantic relationships, because casual interactions are much more subtle. That’s why I have sweet boyfriends but almost no actual friends. It’s too hard to tell if you’re reaching out to someone or bothering them. It’s too hard to figure out what to say, and if you say the wrong thing you can make yourself annoying, or intensely disliked. People have so many foibles, and when you don’t know someone intimately you always have to walk on eggshells.

But when you’re in a love relationship subtlety is not required: you can fawn on the object of your affection and cover his face with kisses, and at worst he may find it weird, but more likely he will find it endearing. Or, if you’re mad, you can just yell at him, and it’s unlikely he will withdraw his affection just for having lost your temper.