He was, at least in the world of “90210,” an intellectual — he loved literature and classic movies, and he did well in the classes he cared about in school. But Dylan had nerdy tendencies before we’d learned to find nerds sexy as a culture, before Buddy Holly retroactively became just as dreamy as James Dean. So Dylan evoked the latter, a beautiful bad boy in the early 1990s when nostalgia for the 1950s was in the air, when 1950s-style diners, including the beloved Peach Pit on “90210,” were popping up all over suburbia.

Dylan McKay was the ’90s version of a “Rebel Without a Cause,” but he had a zillion causes. He had daddy issues and mommy issues, having been abandoned by both as a young teenager. He brooded about his problems quite often, and oh how he could brood! He brooded as if he just might feel things more than the rest of us ordinary humans, that his artistic, sensitive soul (and his nice pecs) put him on a different emotional plane than the rest of us.

Charismatic in a way your dad could never understand, Dylan was pretentious and troubled, but he was also open to being vulnerable, to being wise beyond his years, to being goofy, to being a mensch to his friends. Yes, he was poor little rich boy riding around town on his motorcycle or in his black Porsche, grappling with alcohol and drug addiction and other dark things we could only imagine, but he had a heart of gold. Others might have found that Luke Perry looked unconvincingly old to be playing a teenager, but in my mind I thought maybe that’s just what high school students looked like.

When I was a kid, nothing was more glamorous to me than heartache. I aspired to be the star of my own breakup-cliché montage: to sit on a couch in filthy pajamas surrounded by empty ice cream tubs, snot-filled tissues and whiskey bottles. To cry in the street and have screaming matches on the phone with a boy who evoked too much passion in me to be reasonable. To forsake bathing entirely and to fling myself around dramatically, too overwhelmed by emotion to bother with cleanliness or balance. Dylan and his first love, the incomparable Brenda Walsh, were the perfect models of that messy kind of devotion. I lived for their drama.

Years later, I discovered that although I enjoyed the performance of romantic disaster, the actual experience was not satisfying at all. Constant screaming and crying were signs that a relationship was dysfunctional, not steamy. Living for drama was overrated. We’ve also collectively learned the perils of putting too much stock in troubled bad boys. Which is why Luke Perry’s death feels particularly poignant, because it took me back to a time before I knew how toxic these things were, when bad boys were good.