Life is not a romantic comedy, and I am no John Cusack.

This summer, I learned that the hard way.

In the beginning of summer vacation, I met a girl. We'll call her Mary for the sake of anonymity.

And she was an Ohio State fan.

All my life I've been a Nittany Lion fan, and despite my common sense telling me that any Ohio State fan is worthless, I was interested in her anyway.

Soon my life began to take the plot of a romantic comedy, and I loved it.

We were two different fans, brought together by love and all that other stuff. We were inseparable most of the summer. Everything seemed to be going well.

And then my life crashed about as hard as the Jimmy Fallon flick Fever Pitch.

It all began when I returned to school for the fall semester. Mary was still in high school so our relationship became a long distance one, kept together by phone calls and AOL Instant Messenger.

The first week, we kept in touch and our relationship was still going well. But after this time, it took a turn for the worse.

Mary stopped returning my phone calls. She barely talked to me. When I did get to talk to her, she wouldn't really talk. Half the time she kept me on the phone while she carried on a conversation with other people in the room.

When I asked her why she never talked to me or my returned calls, she would completely flip out and say I had no reason to question our relationship.

She got mad when I would go out on a Friday night, even if it was just to my friend's dorm room.

For our four month anniversary (if you want to call it that), I sent her four roses. I waited three days for her to call me back. She never even called to thank me. The next time I talked to her, she dumped me ... online nonetheless.

The next weekend, I went home because she said she'd talk to me and try to fix our problems. After a six-hour bus ride that covered nearly 200 miles and included a two-hour layover in Harrisburg, I was home.

While at home, Mary never returned my calls. So I stopped by the diner where she worked to catch her. She told me then that she had already made plans for the night, even though she had said she'd spend the evening with me. She said she would call me afterward. She never called. Later, I found out it was because she was chillin' with the 20-something diner cook all night.

I was confused. If I were more like Cusack, I'd be standing in the rain with the girl right now in a heartfelt embrace, but instead, I was more like anchorman Ron Burgundy in a glass case of emotion.

I was devastated, and I let it get the best of me. For nearly a month, I had trouble motivating myself to do much of anything. I didn't concentrate in class and my grades suffered.

But then one day my older brother called me. He told me I needed to get my act together.

It was the same thing everyone had told me all along, but I hadn't been listening. But this time, I realized everyone was right.

I was at Penn State. There are 20,000 girls here. I was living the good life in college with my friends. Back home, Mary, who was younger than me, couldn't see a rated R movie without me. She couldn't drive. All she could do was toil in the McDonald's ball pit.

And although my love life didn't turn out like Serendipity, it was by no means unsuccessful. With three years left at school, I have plenty of time to meet somebody, and I will. I'm sure of it.

So when you get dumped, don't wallow in your own pity because you can meet new people. So do it.

A failed relationship isn't the end of the world. It's the beginning of a new world.

Anyway, I should have known that dating an Ohio State fan wouldn't have worked. Because, in the end, I found out that Mary was just like the Buckeyes.

Nuts.