I live for romantic comedies. I love the idea of love and I can’t wait to have it for myself. I love the representation of love that is meeting in a coffee shop, finding out the one is the person who has always been there, the type of love where trouble always, always means a simple misunderstanding and sometimes people get sad but that sad does not last forever. I could spend hours watching romantic comedies.. It is so stupid of me, so unrealistic, so goddamn teenage girl with no life experience, but I can’t help it. And yeah I cried when Anna Kendrick and Chace Crawford miscarried but I was smiling when they decided to try making a relationship work anyway. I love romantic comedies because I want to live in a world where maybe Summer breaks up with you but in the end you’ll still find Autumn. In short I’m a hopeless romantic. My best friend is not. Sometimes it’s at the point where Lo could not crush me more if she had purposefully decided that she was going to dedicate her life to ruining my idea of love.

In my fairytale fantasy world bad relationships only exist as a means to an end, something that people suffer through to make true love even sweeter. Lo says that she’s been in love before, her love was a huge raging asshole, on drugs, literally. She once described their relationship like this: “I feel like we’re gonna break up for a while but we’ll be together in the end”, which is a pretty cute trope, but that didn't mean I was ready a week later when she goes

‘I think I’m gonna break up with Ally’
‘Oh. Why?’ I asked
‘I dunno, I’m not feeling the relationship thing right now’

 I rationalized it all in the only way I know how: In terms of happy romantic fiction. The way I saw it Lo would find her true transcendental love and look back on what had happened with Ally as a warning a life lesson. Plot twist: Lo doesn’t do life lessons.

After Ally there was a string of people in Lo’s life with varying relevance. Some I liked, some I never met. But the next major plot point in this story is Nez, an older guy (But no worries, not old enough for it to be illegal),  who I felt a completely irrational, very strong abhorrence towards. He seemed to always be around, literally always; he took up all of Lo’s time and I’m pretty sure his only goal in life was to make her shoulder smell exactly like his armpit. He was oddly cheerful to the point of seeming fake, and I couldn’t stand the way his pants never seemed to cover his ankles; and he wore Uggs, not even in a aesthetically pleasing way!  I don’t really believe in hiding my negative feelings so I made my disdain very, very clear.  It's not like I was mean to him per say, I just wasn’t nice, or pleasant, or polite; well I wouldn’t call making retching noises every time I saw him a particularly mean thing to do.

“He's leaving the room now Shay”
“Why?”
“Because you’re mean to him and you scare him”
“Oops. If he was really worthy of your time than he would prove himself by withstanding the force of my loathing”
“He doesn’t have to prove himself to you!”
“Regardless, he’s failing”

After several weeks of his seemingly constant presence I was getting to the point where I was going to admit defeat and try to tolerate him, I figured if  Lo is going to insist on sticking with the guy than maybe it could be love and I would never really stand in the way of a good romance. Days after I made this decision she moved on, I’m pretty sure it was just on a whim too like, ‘oh look the leaves are changing, must be time to redirect my affections!’. I was flabbergasted. That’s not how love works! Lo was supposed to fight for the  relationship to be approved and recognized by all the people in her life and everything would fade to black after an end scene where everyone was smiling and laughing while walking down a cobblestone path with Lo and Nez holding hands in the center, the streets elegantly covered with fall foliage.

After Nez came Crusty, who as far as first impressions went seemed brusque, acted like he was above it all, and well, crusty. Crusty as of now has not yet been removed from the picture, but I have no doubt that he will be.  By its technical definition I might actually be insane because I was still kind of expecting something with some semblance to a nice romantic relationship.

“It’s like a game !”
“How can it be a game if no one is winning?”
“I am winning”
“No you’re not! How can you possibly be winning!”
“I’m having fun”

I’m not having fun, predictably it’s kind of incredibly difficult to live vicariously through someone who has no goddamn idea about, beautifully true awesomely amazing love. Ironically Lo would probably find this all unbelievably  hypocritical coming from me, as I  preach realism to her very often.

“ I don’t want to talk to you right now, your pep talks are always so depressing”
“Those weren’t pep talks, those were this is life deal with it talks”
“Oh wow, really?”

In the movies there’s no way to really know what happens after the credits roll, but I can very assuredly assume that there is happily ever after. I want to be able to believe in the happily ever after for as long as I can. I like to think that maybe it hasn’t happened yet but that Lo will find her one true; in real life there isn’t a two hour screen time limit so there’s more room for mistakes and f***-ups but maybe that just means that at the end of the road after all the Allys and Crusties that they’ll be the perfect person. The other half. Forever. Just like the movies.

This was written over seven months ago and things have most definitely changed.