39 romantic male characters we’d love to date

Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Jake Ryan (Sixteen Candles)

On everyone’s sixteenth birthday, they think of Sixteen Candles. And if you’re anything like Molly Ringwald, you fell in love with Jake Ryan. Here is the thing about Jake, he has all the make up of being a complete and total asshole. Popular in school, attractive, intelligent, you’d think he wouldn’t look twice at someone like Samantha.

You’d be wrong. He ends up doing so much for her and making her sixteenth birthday the best one yet despite everyone else in her life forgetting about it. He’s a literal dreamboat and he’s super sweet to top it off. Sixteen Candles was revolutionary in a way. It showed us that the hot guy in school isn’t always rude and uncaring.

He literally broke down stereotypes by loving Samantha and that’s something else entirely. John Hughes did an amazing job of this in his movies, always showing us what we thought we knew and proving us wrong, but Jake is something else entirely.

He really truly cares about Samantha and even comes to her sister’s wedding and waits for her. Plus, let’s all be honest, Jake Ryan is definitely one of the hottest love interests out there still and we’d all be head over heels in love with him too if we were Samantha.