In every trashy chick flick you have ever seen, there is a heroine figure whose happy ending usually ends in a tulle prom dress, her arms draped around the love of her life (whom she spent the whole entire movie pining over because he was pretty and popular). It is the modern happily ever after of fairy tales. These movies are multiplying in abundance and infecting the prepubescent minds of teenagers across the nation. Movies with this paradigm plot tend to hype up prom to be this huge life altering climax in a person’s life.

Yes, before my prom, a guy in a sparkling baby blue tux pulled up his horse in carriage and professed that he loved me, even though he had never met me before and started speaking to me in old English. He said his name was Romeo and I immediately refused his offer to go to prom with him because we all know how that story ends. Maybe I am over exaggerating the over exaggerated fantasy. Maybe my dress is a silk, dark blue, and he showed up in a black tux and a limo. Maybe we both slowed danced to our favorite song. And he told me that he loved me and that is when I realized that I loved him too. And we eventually got married, moved to the suburbs, bought a house with a white picket fence, and had 2.5 kids. This is still an unrealistic comparison to how my prom actually went.

Most of my friends didn’t go to prom because well, they don’t really like people all that much. They also don’t like trashy pop music, or dresses. However, for me, it was a high school staple mark that I was afraid I was going to regret if I missed it. I went with a few friends. My dress was pink and polka-dotted, my hair was twisted in a braid. I did not have a date. We got lost on the way there, so we could not sit together. And I didn’t dance with anyone in particular. The food wasn’t anything horrible, but it wasn’t anything special. And the music was as trashy as I had expected it to be. I think I had more fun getting ready for prom than I did actually being at prom. I had a good time though, I mean it was fun. My heels started to kill me towards the end, okay, they started killing me towards the beginning. Though sometimes dancing and pretending you are having a good time results in dancing and actually having a good time. But regardless of the amount of fun I had at prom, it is definitely not what I had been anticipating since I was twelve. If I had told myself ten years ago that this is how my prom would turn out, I would have been devastated.

For starters, prom is not nearly as romantic as one might suspect. In fact all I can remember people talking about before prom was boozes, and, at prom, all people would talk about was boozes. They would either talk about how they were already wasted, or how they were going to get wasted. And drunkenness is not exactly the most popular dialect of romance. My prince charming did not take me to prom and I did not meet him there, and this had no life altering traumatic effect on my life over all. The music was played by a DJ, there is no orchestra and they do not play anything resembling orchestra music. Slow dancing isn't all that common or fun, especially if you have no one to slow dance with. Not to mention, no one actually knows what they are doing. And most dissatisfactory, there is no random musical number at the end where everyone turns into Kevin Bacon or Lori Singer.

Now of course everyone’s prom experiences are different, some go in large groups, with their best friends, or significant other. And I suppose some people really do enjoy their prom, but I bet few would state that it was one of the best experiences of his or her life.

I came out of prom the exact way I entered it. The misconception is that prom is the best day of your life. It is not the best day of your life. It probably isn't even one of the best days of your life. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Ordinarily in a novel, the climax arrives towards the end when the plot drips down to a final conclusion. But after prom, your life is not concluding. And there are so many experiences left to be had and seen that you have yet to even imagine. Prom is overrated, because high school is overrated, because being a teenager is overrated. If we accept reality for what it is, we would realize that it isn’t all that tragic that prom isn’t the best day of your life and that it would actually be tragic the other way around. Although my expectations were high overall, my reality turned out even better, because it didn't end there.