It all started with a mix tape. Sure, Buck and I had been courting each other for a while: joining each other in late night stumbles home from the campus bar, calling into each other’s radio shows to turn up the heat with increasingly obscure requests. He even learned how to play a Jen Sbragia song on his guitar for me. But the mix tape, ah, the mix tape was the signal that things were getting serious. I took the tape out of the case (with its cover-so-filled-with-strange-and-exciting-boy-handwriting) and put it in my stereo. I pushed aside the Norton Anthologies and spiral notebooks on my bed so I could fully appreciate the mix as only a collegiate girl with a crush can. And that’s when it came, somewhere at the end of Side A, between the Wedding Present and the Velvet Underground: Third Eye Blind.

Before I go further, I want to point out that at the time of this writing, if you do a Google search for “Third Eye Blind” + “guilty pleasure,” you’ll end up with a whopping 17,000 results. But back then on my bed, upstairs in the house I shared with four whiskey-swilling, vinyl-collecting, vintage-bike-riding girls, aged twenty-one years and as pretentious as a twenty-one-year-old college radio DJ could be – I bolted right up. Third Eye Blind? Until that point I had ignored every sign that Buck might be a geek. (For instance, he was a Classics major. He dressed like an accountant. He kept dryer sheets folded between his shirts to keep them smelling Downy fresh.) I focused, instead, on his cool attributes. (He smoked Marlboro Reds. He was from Texas. He had, for a brief while, been our college radio station’s music director.) The song was “Losing a Whole Year.”

When I told him I had enjoyed the tape, I made sure to let my disapproval of Third Eye Blind be known. I fully expected an admission of “ironic appreciation” – but all I got was a hip-shaking rock-out move that left me with no doubt he meant it. He even told me he’d seen them live three times with a female friend of his. I’d never met the girl, but hearing that she shared a passion with my boyfriend convinced me she was smart, pretty, and almost certainly a cold-hearted serial boyfriend stealer. I went back to the song for a second listen, trying to block out visions of him and Ms. Smart/Pretty/Cold-Hearted bopping along at a summer festival, and thought: hey, this isn’t so bad. I can work with this. So I listened, and I listened, and I listened again.

Love, with all its logic-suspending power, can make us a little too forgiving. Only a couple of months passed before I both fell for Buck and started believing that the lyrical twists of “Losing a Whole Year” rang out with something honest and beautiful about the nature of relationships, something I myself had never been able to capture as vividly as Third Eye Blind, particularly in the lines It always seems the juice used to flow / In the car, in the kitchen you were good to go / Now we’re stuck with the tube / A sink full of dishes and some aqualube -and God, I thought, wasn’t I lucky to have a boy who could recognize such simple brilliance?

After graduation we both moved to New York. Third Eye Blind came with us in Buck’s CaseLogic, where he kept a burned backup copy of every CD he had ever bought. (I should have known by the accountant garb.) I’d often indulge his love of Third Eye Blind when picking out something to play. I let down my guard for “Semi-charmed Kind of Life.” I even let “Jumper” in. At first I just hummed along. But then I started singing, too. It was hard to fight that Doot doo do, Doot do do do. The songs were melodic, infectious.

Buck and I didn’t last long outside the college setting. At some point while we were making the harsh decisions every young New York transplant must make (like where to work and whether or not to hate Williamsburg), we lost our ability to see each other as the characters we had been on the air and around the kegs. As for our breakup, in short: we fought, I went crazy and did a lot of bad things (some involving objects flying and/or breaking), and he had the good sense to end it. At the time I was shattered, but in less than a year he’d moved out of New York and I’d moved on. Still, every once and awhile, I’ll hear one of the songs – guitars flushing, chorus exploding, each chord progression exactly what you would expect it to be, accompanied by nasal whining about crystal meth abuse, suicide prevention, or lube – and I’ll remember him as a boy who broke my heart and the bastard who made me like Third Eye Blind.