I used to have what I suppose you'd call a vandyke from my junior year of high school until halfway through my freshman year of college. When I first did it, I was mainly flaunting my apparent übermanliness - as far as I was concerned, being able to grow out a full vandyke three months before your seventeenth birthday was evidence of a ridiculous level of testosterone! But it always got mixed reactions from girls. Some really went for it, some didn't. A handful of my best friends in high school (including Holy Tard and Venemous Pete who used to post on my boards) had been my friends since first grade, and I trusted their opinions implicitly. Unfortunately, their opinions didn't line up with most girls' opinions once I got to college. Three weeks into spring semester, I was clean-shaven for the first time since my sophomore year of high school. Women noticed, and most of 'em liked it, but I looked in the mirror and felt like I looked fifteen years old. I wanted to find a happy medium between clean-shaven wussy-looking me and bearded scary-looking me. So I went with the half-goatee I've had ever since. It's a nice compromise, and I find it adds to my already profound aura of awesomeness.
