Coming to Minnesota with a girlfriend in college in Connecticut, I thought I would be an outlier in the freshman class. Boy was I wrong. While my high school freshman class had the distinct and widely-endorsed honor of being the sluttiest and generally worst class Carmel High had ever seen, us new first-years are all about committed, long-distance relationships.

So instead of giving you practical, applicable advice I’ve picked up from my current relationship, I’m going to dish out some tips I picked up from my whirlwind seventh grade online affair with darkpixie117. Consider this a cautionary tale.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. To understand the tragic, lusty ballad of ‘pix and I, you first need to enter the life of a practice room-dwelling band geek. In my circle of awkward woodwinds, Runescape was a big fucking deal. The online role-playing game was to my middle school years as sweaty debauchery is to Kagin: synonymous.

Every night, headsets plugged in, Runescape membership fees slowly draining our piggy banks, the boys and I would hit Gielinor and cut loose. Remember now, this was middle school, so my hormones were as active as my social life wasn’t. In addition to goblin slayin’, castle splorin’ and the like, everyone around me seemed to be getting a Runescape “girlfriend.” Then, one fateful day, I walked into a town square on the prowl.

At least in initiating this desperate romance, my virtual rituals weren’t all that different from real life. Done up in my best armor—gold trimmed adamant, bitches—I basically just wandered into town, found the first eligible candidate then sealed the deal with the slickest line I had: “Wanna be my gf.”

That’s right. Gf. Not even g.f. This abbreviation signifies the level of commitment having a Runescape honey required; that is, basically none. This is the source of my first lesson.

When you are with your sexy mage or significant other of choice, you have to make him or her feel special. In Runescape, there were a variety of different “skills” I could have acquired to make darkpixie feel special. With long hours at the anvil, I could have given her all the gold jewelry in Gielinor. Quests for hidden spellbooks would have yielded fantastic powers and enchanted gems.

What did I do instead? Fished lobster. Yep. Lobster. In a fantastic realm of limitless possibilities to a normal 12-year-old, I fished lobster for my sweetie. Apparently, Runescape’s normal courtship rituals really just didn’t gel with my pacifistic, weirdly OCD brand of fun. Each day, truly for hours at a time, I would stand in my same spot on the docks and click over and over again, occasionally scoring some primo crustaceans. Needless to say, giving her the least useful item in a game which is mostly about sword fighting probably didn’t make her feel too special. So, when it comes time to flatter your special someone with a package from afar, choose something that shows more than zero thought.

Now, for my next lesson. In reflecting into this equally amusing and deeply shameful period in my life, I realized I basically had a hidden mistress. Aside from my best friend and my current (non-virtual) girlfriend, you, Mac Weekly readers, are the first people to hear about pixypix. In seventh grade, things like sustained eye contact made me feel embarrassed, so divulging that I had a girlfriend, on the internet no less, would probably be worse than death to Lil’ Me.

Don’t make the same mistakes that I did. If you are in a long distance relationship, you should be pretty committed to your partner, and as such, hiding them from every other human being you know is unhealthy and probably means you should reconsider your life choices.

So I bet you’re wondering, how did my hidden, disappointing, gift-filled romance end? Well, to be blunt, it didn’t. At some point I lost interest—I mean, who needs virtual human companionship when you have inanimate virtual lobster companionship? Of course, I really didn’t think it would be necessary to tell her I didn’t want to be her “bf” anymore, so, like any great tale of mistresses, I left in the middle of the night without so much as a “g2g.”

Whether you’re in a long distance relationship, or you’re just steady mackin’ on a mage named darkpixie117, you have to be honest with your partner. Otherwise, your relationship may end without closure — I have feeling, somewhere, deep in the Wilderness or the land of Brimhaven, I bet the 57-year-old man who played as darkpixie is still looking for me, thirsting for a final lobster from their long lost bf.