A few years ago after watching The Graduate with a boy I liked, I was horrified to learn that he thought the movie was romantic.

The movie follows an apathetic college graduate, Ben Braddock, as he navigates an affair with Mrs. Robinson. The beginning of the movie is a masterpiece, with moments of bliss and pain, but the second half flounders. It isn’t until the last minute that we return to that delicious adrenaline fatigue, to the sourness found at the heart of the cherry. After Ben and Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, run away together, they board a bus, euphoric at their escape. As they settle into their seats, their smiles and laughter dim into ambiguity.

After the boy I liked made those incriminating remarks, I made him watch the last minute again; I even paused on a still of Ben and Elaine’s despondence. He asked if it mattered, whether or not the ending was a happy one. I made an excuse to get him to leave.

Curious of other people’s reading of The Graduate, I searched for a discussion board. A yellow wave of smugness washed over me as I sat in the darkness of my dorm room. My understanding of the movie aligned with the general publics’, but as I scrolled down the page, I found a hyperlinked list of related discussion boards, which then made me feel blue:

1. Can a human love only one person for an entire lifetime?
2. Should I say, I love you, to my long distance Russian girlfriend?
3. Can someone be my soul mate and I not be their soul mate?
4. Can you define “love” in one word?
5. The meaning of it all…?

These questions seem absurd in an online debate. But who among us hasn’t asked similar questions to ourselves in the darkness of our rooms? I sat in my own despair before calling that boy back to apologize.