J. B. (name changed to protect the degenerate) is my Super Mario 3, Level 7 Pipe World. I could never beat Pipe World. Nobody could. You’d slave away for hours, making your right thumb all pruney from the sweat and pressure of hitting the A and B buttons a thousand times. You’d die a crapload of times before any of the following occurred:

You warp-whistled out of there.

You hit reset to play the fun worlds all over again.

You put in Paperboy instead.

J.B. was the first person to ever really screw me up. Ever the Nintendo master, I was a rookie at making out; it was summer a la John Travolta and Olivia Newton John, and I was in love for what I thought was obviously the first and last time.

Then, with a stone face, J.B. said he was leaving for the Cape and then back to school, kissed me on the forehead and said “Thanks for a great summer.” I had jumped down a pit and had to start the World all over again.

Until you say “Forget this!” and warp-whistle away from the first person to mess you up, you’ll just keep falling down those pits and have huge, angry-faced bullets being shot at your head.

And, like the timeless classic Nintendo, you can only play one game at a time. You can’t really beat Zelda while you’re falling down a pit in Mario 3, World 7. Relationships can only happen one at a time.

Eventually, you either have to reset or give up so you can at least save Princess Toadstool. So while you have turtle shells bouncing between bricks, you can’t really insert another game – or person – while you’re trying to do some damage control. Trying to mess with Nintendo games just left you with all those weird lines on the TV, but you can’t take your heart out and blow in it to fix it.

I used to put it on two-players and just make Luigi a martyr for Mario’s cause. I would drag Luigi through all the hard worlds, and then make him go into a one-on-one Pow-World death match versus Mario so I could get his charm.

Don’t hate, I know you did it too.

Unfortunately, you can drag your friends through the misery of the break-up and they can plot revenge, but really the only people in the Pow-World are you and him or her.

But don’t give up your little card symbol.

It seems that no matter what, we all have one guy or girl who we cling to presently, or through memories. We “know” he or she will come back to us because we were “meant to be.”

We wait for the day he or she realizes the colossal mistake of leaving, comes to beg for forgiveness after running 18 miles in a rain storm just so we can scream, “What do you want from me?” They answer with the Hollywood-ready, “You. I just want you.”

We’d see the question-marked boxes and know they were all mushrooms and fire flowers, but really they were those annoying single coin boxes. Those things sucked so much.

And so you’d go jumping down the pit again, even though this time you had a running start and the raccoon tail.

You were about to fly.

Stupid angry-faced bullets.

Eventually, though, I warp-whistled away from J.B. If J.B. ever showed up at my door professing his undying love for me … it’d be a long night.

I live on Mission Hill; I’m not running down to let people off the street into my apartment.

I’d make like King Koopa and shoot some fire balls and Hammer Bros. Hammers at him from the other side of my bridge.

But gamer beware: No matter how many extra lives or mushrooms or fire flowers you have, sometimes you just need to reset for your sanity.

Cheat codes don’t help either. I’ve found the more cheat codes someone knows for video games, the less he knows about women. Weird. Learn the dependable tricks from your friends, like where to find warp whistles and when to become self-reliant.

Don’t think infinite lives are going to help either.

They make you try to will yourself over the pit way longer than is necessary.

And always make sure you’re really ready to make the leap from the 8-bit flat relationship of Nintendo to the three-dimensional-more-controller-buttons-and-guns-and-crap relationship of X-Box.

But gamer beware: Halo’s wicked hard.