If you were to look on my Kindle you would see that I have 395 books. All of these books deal with love, save for like maybe five, and even saying that many are serious is really a stretch.

I’ve always been a reader and an avid reader of the boy-meets-girl-they-fall-in-love genre since the seventh grade. Being in the sixteenth grade (college), this habit of reading has not waned in the slightest. I loved the warm feeling that grew inside as I read along with characters that I became way too emotionally attached to, watching them fall in love. That was the ideal, the cycle that happened in every book I read. It was damn-near guaranteed that the main character, no matter what their flaw was, was going to find the love of their life by the end of the book. Perfect love was found in 300 pages.

I think this formulaic look on love ruined my idea of what love really is.

Let’s pretend that my love life was to be portrayed in one of these novels, okay? The setting would obviously be the wild world of college, where my book-self would go to parties and be involved on campus rather than camping out in her apartment all the time. I would have randomly bumped into the future-love-of-my-life in, say, the Student Union or a random party where he would have caught me after I tripped or dropped something. I would have noticed the way his muscles ever so slightly move under his well-fitted shirt, how his eyes shine like the brightest blue I had ever seen, with a smile that gave me butterflies. He would immediately ask me to go get lunch of coffee or SOMETHING since he obviously knew right then that I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and he knew he shouldn’t let me go. He’d follow me around like a puppy until I finally realized that there was no getting rid of him and that we were destined for an all-consuming love. Right? That’s how the books make love seem.

I went to college expecting this experience to play out. I was ready for it at any moment.

Every time I met a guy I would assess him on a date-ability scale that I had concocted in my head based off of these damn novels that I consumed like oxygen. If you’re a guy that I’ve interacted with in the past few years then, yes, you have been assessed on this scale. Sorry not sorry, but a girl had to be prepared at all times to meet the future-love-of-my-life.

It never happened, at least it didn’t happen on campus.

The truth is, my real-life relationship is nothing like any of those 390 books on my Kindle.

I could wax on and on about my boyfriend, but nobody really wants to read articles about "10 Ways My Boyfriend is the Best" or "Here’s Why My Long-Distance Relationship Works". I don’t think you can sum up a relationship honestly in a piece like that. While my boyfriend can be the best, we both drive each other insane sometimes and, honestly, sometimes my long-distance relationship doesn’t work. It’s hard at times, and the distance is definitely a huge strain. In the boy-meets-girl-they-fall-in-love world, the distance would be no problem. Our fights would last for maybe five pages and then we would move on to the next chapter. In the real world, chapters aren’t so easy to navigate. There’s no way to tell when they’re really going to end or what the ending is going to be.

I think that reading these books left me largely unprepared for the reality of being in a relationship. So often I find myself saying things that would make sense in a book but sounds completely stupid in real life. I made the mistake of thinking that this world of boy-meets-girl-they-fall-in-love was actually real and learned in a really difficult way that life is nothing like a novel.

My best advice is to not try and base your love off of anything. You are wonderful and unique and anything you touch is going to be unique to you. The books aren’t always perfect. Don’t get hung up on these false ideals of love.