Mark Twain hit the nail on the head when he said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” Life is strange, not as simple and predictable as Hollywood would have it. The guy doesn’t always get the girl, and if he doesn’t, it’s rarely the life-crushing event that movies make it out to be. Your first kiss isn’t some magical moment with your eventual spouse. It doesn’t always rain at funerals. The heroes don’t always win; in the end, they’re only human. Sometimes I think people, including me, try to make life something it isn’t: a movie.

We want falling in love to be just like it is in the movies. First we look for the cliché scene: one of you drops your books and the other helps pick them up, resulting in eye contact and a smile that is the beginning of something special. Then we’re meant to enter the “stare at her, then look away when she meets your gaze” stage. After that, the guy works up the courage to ask the girl out to dinner or a movie (of course, the encounter is both sickeningly cute and awkward), and the date goes well. They go to prom and fall in love during the slow dance. One of them inevitably has to move out of town, or graduates, and thus ensues the emotional good-bye scene. One watches the other’s car until it is out of sight, followed by depression and lots of ice cream.

Well, let me tell you the version of that story that happened to me. I dropped my books in the hallway, and of course a girl knelt to help me. I looked up and saw she was one of the school cheerleaders – one who I didn’t find particularly attractive. A guy, maybe her boyfriend, was standing behind her. After I stood up, I said “Thank you” and hurried off to my AP Chemistry class, never to talk to her again.

There was another girl. We were both on the robotics team. We liked each other, and she asked me to prom. I was an underclassman; she was an upperclassman. I accepted and asked her out a few days later. Our first kiss was pretty awkward and notably unmagical. The relationship ended in three months, leading up to an excruciatingly awkward prom as exes. I was over her in a month or two. Not a very entertaining plot for a rom-com.

As for funerals, I’ve only gone to one, and if my memory serves me right (I was eight), it didn’t rain. I didn’t even cry. I mean, come on, it was my great-grandfather. I hardly knew the guy. The only other experience I’ve had with death – or should I say near-death – was when my mother nearly bled out from a rare cancerous tumor in her stomach. I didn’t get the dying piece of advice from her that would give me guidance throughout life. In fact, I was in school when she had to go to the emergency room; I was needed by my robotics team, which was in the middle of the competition season.

Mom was in the hospital for the next few months, and I was so busy I barely saw her. She is still on chemo today – but not the kind that makes you go bald and need to wear a mask. Instead, she’ll be taking a pill every day for a couple of years. She’s functioning, although not at 100 percent. This is another anecdote that would not make for a good movie.

You know that girlfriend I mentioned earlier? Well, she wasn’t what you would call stable. I feared that she would hurt herself multiple times during our relationship. I did my best to make her happy, but I couldn’t be her Superman. I was just me. I didn’t “save” her. I wasn’t a hero who turned her life around. I didn’t get her into counseling or anything, but I made her feel better those few months we were together. This was in the midst of my mother’s health problems, so she helped me too. The relationship was useful for a time, but then we realized that we weren’t meant for each other, and it ended. If there’s a pattern forming, it’s that my life isn’t destined to become a Hollywood blockbuster.

Movies are brief sessions of fiction created to help us escape from reality, but they influence us more than we think. We want the escape to be reality. We want that relationship we see in the movies. We want our Superman to swoop in and save the day, and sometimes this hinders our lives. Girls often want their crush to make the first move, just like in the movies, but often the guy is in his own universe, oblivious to this girl he’s never spoken to. Meanwhile, the girl is stuck with the misconception that this guy she’s been crushing on is going to figure it out and then they’ll be so cute together. But in reality, if she were to go up to him and start a conversation, the fantasy relationship could become a real one. Guys see movies with incredibly beautiful women and forget that they are acting out a story – that real women are not like the ones in the movies. This often leads men to have unrealistic standards, making it harder for them to find satisfying relationships.

People want heroes to swoop in and fix their lives, but the truth is that more often than not, your hero doesn’t exist. You have to work hard to get that job, you have to pull yourself out of depression, and since nobody knows what they’re doing when it comes to relationships, you have to take the dive and just ask that person out. No one is going to do it for you.

Movies are made for money by storytellers who carefully create a finite universe with a beginning, middle, and end. Whoever or whatever you believe created the universe, it didn’t make a script.

So don’t try to be an actor. Be a person. Do what makes you happy, not what makes people in the movies happy. Love how you want to love, not how movies tell you to. Grieve how you need to grieve, not how actors do it. The amount of emotion a movie can create in you pales in comparison with the beauty you can experience if you get out there and just live.