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'Once upon a time' and 'They lived happily ever after' is just not reality. Love takes blood, sweat and tears, and even then it cannot promise a happy ending. Hollywood, however, makes us believe that love is this great, breathtaking gift that we need to accept with open arms. The part that Hollywood refuses to acknowledge is the part where there is not a happy ending. Somehow it always ends perfectly, right? WRONG.

It all started the day our parents sat us down in front of the television to watch our favorite Disney princess meet their "Prince Charming." Yes, Cinderella had to defeat her evil stepmother in the process, but love prevailed in the end. Her Prince Charming came to the rescue and gave her a better life. They lived happily ever after - or so we have been trained to believe.

Our parent's generation had that once upon a time love story, as a significant number of them are high school sweethearts. The football player met the cheerleader, married right out of high school, and lived happily ever after- according to Hollywood, at least.

When you take a good look into those households now, those fairy tale romances are full of scandal and pain. Husbands are cheating on their wives with women half their age, and women turn their heads the other way because they see the pool boy every other Thursday afternoon. But again, Hollywood is leaving the heartache out of their story lines.

If love solved all problems like we have been taught in fairy tales, then why is there things called "breakups," "heartbreak" and "broken-hearted"? The word 'break' is associated with love. It is a package deal. By accepting love, you are also accepting the possibility of having it break.

Hollywood leaves that word out of its vocabulary. Yes, we do understand that the happy couple does suffer some sort of dilemma, but their problems are usually solved with a cute little choreographed song and dance. Real high schools are not like that. Never is the captain of the basketball team also the star of the school musical, and never is his girlfriend the next American Idol. Again, most people do not meet their future spouses in high school.

We have been trained to expect the two main characters of the movie to end
up together. We all can now walk into a movie theater and know the ending within the first 30 minutes of the film. We all know they will overcome the current problem they are facing and solve it together. Rarely are we surprised with an ending of the couple not surviving- even though that is how real life is for us. We may be writing our own love stories, but we can never predict the ending; it is never revealed to us. If we had the answers to our future, what would the point of living in the now be?

We do not get a soundtrack to our lives. No sad song plays when your girlfriend dumps you. There is no wonderfully uplifting whirlwind of strings and joyous chords harmonizing in the background when you kiss your wife on wedding day. Sinking the game- winning basket never results in a joyous fanfare trumpeting in the background. Emotions are swayed in film by music; there is a reason for movie scores and compositions.

Hollywood fatally downplays the effects of hurt and sadness in relationships because it is not what people want to see. For some reason, breakups do not seem to last longer than a 30-second montage consisting of said dumped party staring out the window and walking by a lake set to the bridge of "Halelujah" by Kate Voegele. In reality, the desperation of a shattered heart takes months, sometimes years, to heal. A typical romantic film might have five minutes of breakup footage (and even that is lighthearted and inspirational), but real relationships take years to fully heal.

Films give an unreasonable expectation of romance and dating. Face it: no one's life is a Hollywood love story. No one can be expected to ride off into the sunset on a white horse with Prince Charming in tow. Fairy tale endings are fine for Hollywood, but that is precisely where they belong. To expect that your life will turn out how you see it on the silver screen is nothing short of laughable. People go to movies to get an escape; they cannot expect that this escape is a manual describing how to manage their love lives.

Movies are made for the most part as a source of enjoyment and amusement. The word amusement is an apt description for this act. The root "muse" is derived from the Latin word meaning "to think." Throw in the prefix "a-" (quite literally meaning "un" or "not") and you find yourself "not thinking: while you enjoy yourself." Going to a movie for amusement, then, is a way to relax and let your mind wander and escape from reality. Not thinking is how we as people relax and let go of the daily grind. To assume that the message gained from a source of amusement should be taken at face value is irresponsible and illogical.

Let us clarify a few things. To cynically propose that all love is empty and meaningless (as Hollywood's is) is just as illogical as embracing the ideal that everything portrayed by the media is how society truly operates. There is nothing wrong with watching a film and escaping from the pressures of daily life- that is why media entertainment exists. Hollywood creates those movies because they are what people want to see. We want an escape. We want everything to be right in our lives; to take the messages in a film and directly apply them to major facets of real life is dangerous. Those messages are what we want to hear, but they will never reflect how we truly operate.

Do we believe in love? Yes we do. But we believe in real love- the love that takes effort and the love that is not guaranteed. We believe in the power of love and that one should listen and follow their heart- not the heart of Ali or Noah from "The Notebook", and their 'happily ever after' story. There's never a happy ending because true love never ends.