The Story of Mr. Ken Doll: The Soccer God Who Took My Virginity and My Appetite (solo episode)

This one's just me, no guest — the first in a new monthly series where I crawl back through my own messy dating history and report what I found. Consider this me stepping out from behind the host chair and onto the stage, banana hammocks and all.We're going back to the summer of 2005, my first field hockey preseason at Oberlin — a tiny, gloriously weird liberal arts school in Ohio where the cool kids were sad art boys and the soccer team had just come back from Brazil with a luggage full of bad decisions. Enter Mr. Ken Doll: 6'3", Calvin Klein face, pre-med major, artist parents, a Soho loft, and absolutely zero intention of ever dating me. Naturally, I was obsessed.I get into the full arc — the shirtless pickup soccer game that broke my brain, the talent show I will never psychologically recover from, the art history class plot twist, the formal where my witchy intuition called it, and the run-in two years later on Astor Place that sent me straight to a bar for a shot and an IPA. Plus the thing I actually learned underneath all of it: that the butterflies weren't butterflies, the chemistry was chaos, and if someone isn't choosing you, that's the whole answer.Spoiler: I lived. And Mr. Ken Doll has officially become an afterthought.Find me on Substack at necterine.substack.com and on Instagram and TikTok @_necterine. If this one made you text nobody and feel something, do me a favor and rate and review the show — it genuinely helps more cuties find their way here. Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe