Written by Ben Joseph

Your mileage may vary, but they are:

The Beginning:
Maybe you were good at sports, maybe you always sucked, but a semester of 4am burritos hasn’t helped either way. She’ll be cute, blonde, and look better in track shorts than she does make-up. Through careful deception, you’ll convince her you can still play intramural soccer sans heart attacks.
The End: 
This, of course, is a lie, and you’ll both discover that, in the strictest animal-eating/shelf-building sense, she’s more of a man than you. You’ll have fun, but as soon as you try to keep up with her on the field (and elsewhere), she’ll be forever left with an image of you, wheezing, doughy, and begging her to slow down.

The Beginnng:
Scene: An awful club with a one-word name like "Velour" or "Prolapse". You hate places like this. She’s skinny, tanned, and seems to be wearing a confusing handkerchief. She starts talking to you. You love places like this. Your friend’s a promoter or a DJ, whichever is cooler? She offers pills, and you desperately wonder if there’s a non-alphabetical difference between "E" and "X".
The End:
A few months later, you’ll be broke, exhausted, and starting to resemble Christian Bale from "The Machinist". She’ll pout, amused by your misery, and you’ll suddenly identify strongly with those sleepy YouTube puppies. Before even remembering if the sex was good, you’ll be dreaming of a world where naps are worth more than gold. Also, dinosaurs with lightsabers.

The Beginning:
After years of being told you’re a "nice guy", you’ll finally meet a girl who makes you feel like James Dean, if James Dean had Wolverine claws and once drank eleven Bud Lites in a single night. To her puritanical sensibilities, you’ll be a badass, and you’ll fucking love it.
The End:
Option A, she’s the real deal and will try to change you. There may be a girl worth waking up at 8am on a Sunday morning for, but you’ll quickly decide she ain’t it. Option B, under the thin veneer of virtue there’s a boatload of real crazy, and she’ll quickly realize your Level 60 Badass is as lame as the World of Warcraft reference I just made.

The Beginning: 
Not beautiful, not cute, just "hot". Whether it was Daddy, society, or the media who ruined her, she’s spent years fighting her natural looks to end up in a place that should, by definition, be attractive, but feels distractingly photoshopped. She finds you interesting, and, in a moment of weakness, you’re going to go for it.
The End:
You two will last exactly as long as your tolerance for crippling insecurities and songs by former Mousketeers. As insufferable as you find her, she’ll find you distant, inconsistent, and generally a jerk. You’ll still keep a picture of her to show off. She won’t.

The Beginning:
Between the tough internship and the actually interesting classes, you’ll decide that a girlfriend should be like your old Ford Taurus: not flashy, but reliable, low maintenance and often mistaken for an undercover cop car. One day after Lit class, you’ll ask her out and, when she says yes, you’ll pretend to be excited, just like you did when you were sixteen.
The End:
There will be movies, dinner, and perfunctory but satisfying sex. It will be, by all technical definitions, "a relationship". Then, as your schedule clears, you’ll realize you want something more, and that you just spent the last four months with someone "just good enough".  As did she.

The Beginning:
You’ve spent hours discussing weed, hoodies, and children’s television from the 80s. She was there when you thought you could play guitar; you were there when she had that tat of Jem & the Holograms removed from her inner thigh. In fact, you’re completely comfortable with each other – did you just discover the magic warp pipe to dating without fear or anxiety?
The End:
Well, yes, but without fear and anxiety, without the unknown, dating is about as titillating as a five-year-old Slanket. And nobody only a certain percentage of people (whose websites I find personally very confusing) wants to fuck a Slanket.

The Beginning:
Beautiful, funny, kind, she’ll inspire you to acts of poetry that will inspire your friends to call you gay. You’ll say it’s "love", defined here as a one-sided activity comprised mostly of staring at her Facebook. After ten months of carefully planned, slightly pathological courtship, she’ll take a chance on you. And it will be everything you hoped for.
The End:
Aesop had a fable about a squirrel so scared of someone stealing his nuts that he lost them. Actually, it might have been a lion. Or maybe it was a Michael Crichton novel. Regardless, you will always be afraid of screwing things up with her. And (irony alert) this is what will screw things up. You’ll realize you’re in a relationship in which you can never truly be comfortable, and, five sweaty weeks later, just as graduation rolls around, you’ll realize she’s moved on. Your turn.