We’ve all been there. That moment when the butterflies in your stomach start to stir, your heart beats a little too fast and you find yourself smiling for no apparent reason. That moment when you’re about seventy-three pages into a book, thirty minutes into a movie, or seven episodes into a television series and you realize it’s happening. You’ve fallen in love with a fictional character or celebrity … again. Either way, you’re probably never going to meet them. Or they’re never going to be anything but a character whose lines have been written for them. But we continue to stalk their twitter feeds, imagine they’re speaking to us when they’re actually just lines of text on a page, or dream about what it would be like if we could ever be together. Let’s be honest, we all do it. I, for one, am the queen of “falling in love” with people I will never actually met. But why? There has to be a reason that we spend so many hours thinking about things we know just simply won’t happen. After my most recent experience with this situation (shout-out to Mockingjay and Gale), I’ve reduced it to two primary reasons.   

First, a fictional character or celebrity demands no actual commitment. As much as women want to be pursued and loved, commitment can often be intimidating. So instead of investing in an actual relationship, we choose to fantasize over characters with which we have no real future. There’s no real investment and if we lose them, it won’t hurt as bad because you never actually had them.  But the relationship is never reciprocated. It is perpetually one-sided. We invest our emotion and time into these characters, to never feel “loved” in return. And at the end of it all, the movie ends, the series gets cut, or we turn the last page of the book and we’re left feeling empty. While it might sound silly, every time we “fall in love” with a fictional character we invest a tiny piece of our heart into that “relationship”. Don’t roll your eyes. Think of how many times you’ve watched Twitter explode over Team Gale, Augustus Waters, or Juan Pablo?  Those obsessions wouldn’t ensue if hundreds of thousands of women weren’t investing in those “relationships”. So we dream about the day that we meet our celebrity crush,or the guy that’s just like our favorite character. But here’s the thing, ladies. All those guys —they’ve had their lines written for them. They are fabricated and molded into being the “ideal” man. And for us to compare the men that we meet in our actual lives to the men in Hollywood productions is simply unfair and unrealistic.    

The second reason we fall in love with fictional characters? As women, we want to be the heroine. We want to be the beauty that is an integral piece of the mission. We want to be the girl who changes things, who is captivating. Think of some of the most popular movies in the last year. Divergent, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars … the list goes on. What do these all have in common? A woman who steps in and mixes things up. But we don’t just want to be the heroine, we want to be the heroine who is pursued. The woman who makes a difference not only within the main plot, but who turns that certain guy’s world upside down. I don’t think it’s any mistake that there have been such a connection to these movies. They have everything a woman wants! 

If we’re being honest, even if we consider ourselves independent and someone who doesn’t need a man, we still crave to be pursued and loved. Look at Peeta in The Hunger Games. He loves Katniss through everything they go through together. What about Four in Divergent? He recognizes Tris’s potential and loves her in his quiet, brooding way. And The Fault in Our Stars? Augustus Water unapologetically confesses his attraction to Hazel even when he knows that she’s terminally ill.  And that kind of love is something we crave. So once again, we “fall in love” with these stories and characters because we want a man who’s going to pursue and take risks for us. And quite frankly, that’s not something we find very often in our current, casual hook-up culture. So we fall in love with the character that we wish was part of our actual lives. Don’t believe me? Meander your way over to Twitter and search Team Peeta or Augustus Waters.   

So here’s the thing, you deserve to be wooed and chased like the women we read about and watch on TV screens. Don’t sell yourself short, but don’t hold the men in your life to unrealistic expectations either. Because the reality is that our men don’t have Hollywood sets, Hollywood budgets or authors writing their lines. The men in our actual lives probably aren’t going to be able to afford to whisk us away on some week-long adventure or know just what to say at just the right time. He’s probably never going to profess his love to you in the middle of a huge war with both of your lives in danger. (I’m looking at you Peeta & Katniss.) And that’s okay. Because after investing massive amounts of energy into these stories and characters, we eventually have to come to terms with the fact that none of it was ever real. Augustus Waters never took you to Amsterdam and Gale never hunted with you in the woods of District 12.   

But perhaps if we reinvested all of this energy into our own lives, we could realize how beautiful our personal stories can be. Wouldn’t you rather have a raw, real and reciprocated relationship than one that needs a team of eight writers telling your main man what to say and when? Wouldn’t you rather hear him stutter over saying he loves you while drinking a cup of cheap McDonald’s coffee because that’s all either of you can afford? Maybe it’s time for us to realize that those fictional men are taking far too much of our time and energy and reinvest in ourselves and the relationships we don’t have to hide behind a screen to be a part of.