Let me start from the beginning, and from the beginning I mean a couple of days ago, when I walked in on my parents and brothers reading my childhood diary out loud. My reaction was equal parts horror and humiliation. Remembering the days where boys were in that grey area of cute but also possibly contaminated with cooties, my mind immediately raced with all the possibilities of what could be locked inside that book. The diary documented a simpler time, when note passing was like second base, and it was a totally normal thing to be dating half the class at the same time.

However, as my family continued to read with tears in their eyes from laughing, I realized I'm actually kind of hilarious. Eight-year-old me had a thing or two to say about the rules of romance, and it would be a shame to keep my wisdom off the Internet. My hope is that most of you will be able to relate to this time of adolescence when nothing was more important than being liked and accepted. Here it is: the contents of an entry in my diary and my reactions to it; do with it as you wish.

10 Ways to Get Boys to Notice Like You

1. Get him to notice you. Example: sit next to him at lunch. Huh, straight and to the point. I like it.

2. Once you have his attention, give him a million-dollar smile! Let's do this.

3. Then, after a couple of smiles, move on to the old-fashioned hair flip or the new put-your-hair-up-then-let-it-down-and-throw-it-around trick. Things just got a little more complicated.

4. After that, he should be talking to you daily. You should listen to him, but DON'T smile. Just have a plain face with wide eyes. Don't show any expression at all. Torture him. Seems like I had a darker side. This step could easily come across as creepy, though. I must have handled myself well.

5. Now it's time to play hard-to-get. Walk away whenever he comes near you. I know this is hard, but trust me. Don't even talk to him, at least for three days. Because step 4 wasn't playing hard-to-get. I like that I was time specific, an 8-year-old woman in charge. Seems my manipulation of men's emotions started at a young age.

6. Now you should smile at him. He should smile back or look relieved. I'm still cracking up at this stage. I feel like there should be a note of caution saying something like: "If not, return to start; something went terribly wrong."

7. Start talking to him and sitting next to him more. Ground control. I feel it.

8. Then this is the stage where you should start passing notes. A subtle way to let everyone in the class know you two are an item.

9. This is where you start blowing kisses and calling each other pet names like cookie or sugar pie. I can say my pet-name ideas have not improved much over the years.

10. This is the stage where you kiss. The final stage. Leaving us with little to no instruction on the lead-up, I guess we'll have to fill in the blanks.

Well, there you have it. My totally uncensored childhood advice on the ways to make yourself irresistible. And if some of you are still questioning the validity of my method, I then proceed to list all the boys it worked on in my class. Then, scribbled on the bottom of the page is a note saying: “p.s. I have not tried stage 9 or 10 yet.”

It's funny to see how little has changed. That 8-year-old girl is a version of myself who I know is still in me somewhere. When it comes to boys, she may think she's coming across as a queen, but in reality she is still kind of awkward. While the dating scene is a little bit different from the elementary school playground, romance still remains one of the most heavily complicated and drama-filled topics today. This diary entry is proof that even back in third grade, I had to make a 10-step guide full of mind games and emotional manipulation. And I think this is a central element in our hookup culture: We're too afraid to admit our real feelings, so we pretend like we don't have them.

I think it's time for our generation to be a little vulnerable. It took the words of my childhood self to make me realize this, and maybe it's time some of you pulled out those old journals. It's time to leave the games behind. If you like someone, tell them! That's the real dating advice here. If I learned anything from my family reading my diary, it's that it's ok to laugh at yourself; life is too short not to.