If Josh Hutcherson Were Your Boyfriend -The Toast

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, you would be on a first-name basis with all the dogs that lived in your apartment building. “There goes the nicest human we have ever met,” the dogs would say, if they could communicate with you in words and not just barks.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would find your inability to spell simple words endearing. “Privilege is a hard one for all of us,” he would say as you stared at the open email draft on your computer screen, wondering whether to add a “d” to the word or not.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, you would spend hours making mixtapes for one another like a pair of tweens from 1997, with titles like “Remember That Time You Flushed Your Keys Down The Toilet?” and “Christmas ’09: Too Many Wreaths” and “Artisan Pizza Soundtrack.”

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would finally convince your dad to stop wearing the same baseball hat he’s had since his childhood in the 1950s, reaching him through a combination of coded baseball jargon and the unspoken bond that unites all fans of the New York Mets.

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If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would understand the importance of gesturing when telling a good story, and never mention to you that you possibly looked like you were trying to land a fighter jet with just your arm movements. He would just carefully and gently remove any decorative ceramic bowls within a twenty-foot radius of you when you launched into one of your tales.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would give all your relatives incredibly thoughtful gifts for the holidays. He would spend hours knitting a hat for your mom (not wool, she’s allergic) and hand-wrap it himself with perfectly symmetrical folds, expertly color-coordinating the bow with the wrapping paper. He would continually astound you with his gift-giving abilities, anticipating your desire for an entire coloring book about The Good Wife before you even knew such a thing existed.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would never lord it over you that he was truly superb at accents when you played charades at holiday parties. He would always choose you to be on his team, even though he knew you struggled to even imitate your grandmother’s Pennsylvanian dialect. He, on the other hand, would seamlessly move from a Scottish to a Croatian accent, finally landing on his native Kentucky drawl, impressing all your holiday party guests.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would entertain your friends for hours, expertly mixing cocktails like a wise bartender during Prohibition and listening intently to their tales of workplace microaggressions and bad scones.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would turn every mundane task into an adventure. “We’re out of toilet paper,” you would say, and he would respond, “Then off to the grocery store!” with the bottled energy of one thousand labradoodle puppies.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would leave work early just to come by and surprise you with tickets to see Hamilton. He would bring a box of tissues for both of you to use as you cried your way from “Stay Alive” to the Act II finale.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would always, without fail, bring you a soft pretzel from the mall, knowing that your deep-seated hatred of public shopping experiences interfered with your one true love of soft pretzels.

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If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would know that the only proper way to be woken up on a Saturday morning is by the smell of French toast he’s making, delivered to you on an old-timey silver platter he found behind the dumpster when he took out the trash earlier that month.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, your life would be full of baked goods lovingly made from Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, and the baby-blue KitchenAid mixer you got for your college graduation would finally have a use apart from filling space on your kitchen counter.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would insist that Twitter rants by famous people were really just masks for fear and sadness, and that we would all be better off taking deep breaths, maybe reading some Rumi, and remembering our place in the universe.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, it would forever be tailored peacoat weather.

If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would not be weirded out by the fact that you routinely have the impulse to toss him over your shoulder and carry him around public places, like an adorable human backpack. As your boyfriend, he would totally and completely get it.

Elena Rivera is a Latina journalist who loves writing about the intersection of race, culture and television. Her work can be found on Popoptiq and The Televixen.