It’s my parent’s fault that I’m a hopeless romantic.

The Croskells, bless their hearts, recently celebrated their 27th wedding anniversary. Despite being two people who aren’t always very fond of other human beings, my folks have somehow put up with each other for nearly three decades. Although I’m incredibly fortunate that the two people who raised me love each other very much, this fact— combined with the amount of sappy romance films I’ve watched growing up — have left me with a hopelessly unrealistic desire to romanticize everything around me.

My Tumblr is full of a large quantity of quotes from my favorite authors. From Fitzgerald to T.S. Eliot, and even Hemingway, it’s a myriad of artsy photos with flowing words that relate to loving deeply and living each day to its fullest. The obvious fact that I’m incredibly basic aside, I really do love pretty pictures and pretty words, and I have a bad habit of wanting everything to be as beautifully minimalistic as my blog.

Hopeless romantics are the sort of people who watch a romance film, comedy or not, and say “I want that.” Plenty of different types of romantics exist — I’m personally the “lie under the stars with you and make up new constellations” type — but they all live for that butterfly feeling you get when someone looks at you and you can see the universe in their eyes.

I digress. The simple fact is that being a hopeless romantic in college is hard. In the world of Tinder hookups, which I struggle with terribly, I get a lot of laughs when I tell people that I’d rather walk around Old Town during the winter than go to a club. I’m not saying that there’s no romantic culture here, and it’s entirely possible that I’m looking for love in all the wrong places, but it seems that college culture is counterproductive to those of us who want to live in the fairyland of romanticism.

Being a romantic isn’t always about relationships either. For me, romanticism is the reason I love photography and writing. It’s a love of capturing little moments and taking them out of the terrible realism of life — preserving them forever in a sort of beauty that can’t be found anywhere else. Sometimes it’s about appreciating sunsets and full moons  and other pretty sights that are often worth simply taking a moment to take in and appreciate. It’s about loving the little things, and romanticizing things that aren’t always a thought in other people’s minds. Personally, I like to take a moment when I’m driving my jeep with the top off in the summers, crank up some Bryan Adams and imagine that I’m living my life in a movie where I can just drive on forever.

I’m going to find someone who I can put up with for as long as my parents have put up with each other eventually. I’m going to lie with them under the stars, hold their hand and live in that moment for as long as I can. But for now, I’m romanticizing the little things. I’m going to take a moment every time I smile and take a mental snapshot that I can enjoy forever.

That’ll be enough to get me through the day, I think.

Collegian Reporter and Columnist Chapman W. Croskell can be reached at entertainment@collegian.com and on Twitter @Nescwick.