Learning to love is like teaching yourself to walk while blind folded. The blind fold is pure ambition and intoxicating intrigue in the person. Slowly but steadily they creep into your heart as if boiling a frog. Before you know it --you’re toast. You have purchased a good for nothing boyfriend without looking into the return policy. Sure enough every high school drama has it—the break ups, the hookups, the devastation but in all honesty how realistic is it? When you pick up a book you escape to another world where things happen just the way you have always dreamed. Fiction isn't remotely realistic, because it's the idea of what the author wishes to be true. But, by stating the truth, does the fairytale lose its magic? Does the poem lose its rhyme and the song its enchanted melody?

If love isn't perfect like in the movies or books, why is it still so wonderful? When combated by the harsh realities of life, one would think that a value such as love would be overshadowed. There's something unreal about love. No matter how many times you get hurt, how many times you get blown off by jerks, and you're shamelessly used . . . you still come back. Something that stings so strongly shouldn't mean the world to you.

I am a modern woman, feministic and self-dependant . . . but I melt at the sight of his smile. I will never understand the "species" we classify as "male". One moment, everything is perfect. He's smiling at you across the room, not just any smile either, a "secret smile" passed individually. Then we'll get close, until every moment is like living a scene from a Rom-com. But there's a problem with allowing your heart to fly in fantasy--what comes up comes down. In the movies, Sandra Bullock doesn't automatically get the guy. No--of course they spend an eternity spinning their wheels. Eventually, the moment finally happens-they get together. They find happiness. But that isn't an acceptable ending--of course not-they haven't yet added some manufactured reality into the plot . In result, you have to spend all of this painstaking time, waiting for the couple to reunite.

We all know the plot line. It's a generic cookie cutter format universally accepted. But for some reason, we continue to watch the movie, awaiting the moment they get back together. What's the purpose of watching a movie if you already know what's going to happen?

Because in that two-hour period of time, you live the romance you've always dreamed of. But off the screen, when the lights are on, no popcorn to entertain, is the magic still there?