When one is cooking a frozen dinner on a lonely, quiet, relaxing night, simple steps are involved. Anyone could figure out how to make some late night mac and cheese, unless he or she is in alien or has no arms. One must open the box, remove the transparent flap, and place the cheesy mess in a microwave no less than four minutes. The hardest part of this process is feeling the saliva and drool meet in the center of your mouth and form a swimming pool of spit. Once one gets through with the heating phase, he or she must stir the product, and enjoy. The worst that could happen is an atom bomb of cheese sauce exploding inside the microwave, causing World War III to start in your kitchen, with Europe and Asia somehow getting involved. Heating up food is a very simple process, yet the slightest mistake can leave you cleaning for hours. Such is the reason why joining Hell’s Kitchen should not be your number one priority.

Frozen macaroni and cheese reminds me a lot about a relationship. One small mistake with a girl during your years as a teenager and you have failed. Dating or talking with girls used to be so much simpler than it is now. In kindergarten or Pre-K, talking with girls was a breeze. The usual kindergarten jargon consisted of various conversation topics, such as the opinions of white crayons, or the flavor of blue Play-Doh. “Playing Hard to Get” was vacant when it came to our three year old dictionaries. Then we began to grow up, and interests and opinions began to change. Webkinz were ignored, and eventually starved to death; Barney suddenly became an example of an LSD trip. Men’s attitudes switched from “There it is, Dora! There’s your backpack!” to “I don’t give a damn. Just find it.” Women gradually gained an extra digit in their age, slowly before a waterfall of emotions and feelings began overflowing in their heads. Conversations between the two genders varied as well, and friends began to vanish. New vocabulary sprung up, it’s branches expanding every school year or sleepover.

In high school, it seems almost impossible to talk to girls. I stop in my tracks whenever I try to come up with a conversation topic. This weakness of mine began freshman year, when I asked a girl to a winter dance for the first time in my whole life. I remember the morning I asked her. Mabry was her name. She was popular and outgoing, causing me to feel like Superman after she said yes. We hugged after I heard her answer, and she carried the tulips I bought her from a heavyset lady at the grocery store in the morning for the rest of the day. Apart from the swollen feet that were stepped on due to a crammed dance floor, Mabry and I had a good time. That is, until the week after, when I received the first mixed signal in my life. For those who don’t know what a “mixed signal” is, it is an emotion or expression that causes men to question women, and women to consider stabbing themselves to death for a period of three weeks. Every time I came up to Mabry she would act as if I had chopped up her best friend and put her in my laundry machine. I was avoided by her in the hallways, and ignored whenever I sent her a text message. I was only fifteen at the time, and my confidence was crushed.

I didn’t want to have anything to do with girls for a year after that incident. My mentality of a good relationship was obliterated. “What could I have done? Why does she hate me?” I often thought to myself. I was scared of making even the slightest gestures to girls for a long time, including eye contact or jokes. Human contact with women made me ponder why men keep trying to please them. I stop and think for a couple of minutes why I want to keep chasing girls, when all they do is pick up a man’s heart, stroke it, cradle it, and then smash it to pieces.

It wasn’t until February of 2013 when Mabry was finally out of my head, and my new target came out into my eyesight. Her date was a tall, lanky blonde haired junior, which was one of the reasons I even considered having a chance with her. After seeing him play Star Wars with imaginary light sabers in the stairwell, I realized she was nice enough to go to a dance with any guy, in or out of her league. She was painfully shy, and if she was ever at a restaurant, she was the type of red haired girl who would rather eat her own fingers off than ask for more Parmesan Chicken, in order to avoid eye contact and communication with her waiter. When I introduced myself for the first time, all I received in return was a quick nod. She wasn’t into types of guys like me. She was an athlete, and I was a film geek. She was a girl who fell for types of men who knew the brand of a football better than their own parents, and was currently falling for the defensive lineman right then.

Because of this, my desire to impress her and talk to her grew to enormous amounts within the next few weeks. I would have my eye on her for months, never having the nerve to go up and talk to her. I would soon become so obsessed that I would use the internet as my ally, surfing the web from morning until five and bookmarking everything I thought that could possibly work. I suddenly turned into a high school detective. Asking everyone from administrators to janitors that only spoke Spanish, I sought to find answers. I asked my friends for advice, and they responded with “Just talk to her!”

“About what?” I would reply. I couldn’t just go up and talk to her, she was shy. She would wonder why some random senior was questioning her out of the blue, and talk to her friends about how strange my conversation with her was. The last thing I wanted was to talk about subjects that had no meaning, and ended up embarrassing myself. If I didn’t have a reason to talk to her, chances are my conversation would erupt with awkwardness, like a deadly volcano in Hawaii. I needed to approach her with some kind of reason. For instance, purposefully drop my book as I pass her in the hall causing pages to tear and an accident to commence. Hopefully, she would then help me out and pick up the novel, with a smile on her face, and give it back to me. If I approached her without a reason, a mess of verbal diarrhea conversation topics, such as “I like waffle fries. What about you?” or “In 1742, I’m pretty sure it was Columbus realized the earth was round. Do you know?” would spill out of my mouth. My confidence would then drop so far I would eventually have to close the whole case, technically before it even started.

I needed to make a move quickly before the year ended. I once had the perfect chance of becoming her friend at lunch. For some odd reason, I blew the chance of continuing to talk to her after we ate together due to the combination of pretending she wasn’t there in order for her to talk first, and low self -esteem. I just needed to start talking. What I needed was a relationship coach. A man who saw through my failures and would teach me to change for the better. A man who would say “Besides your acne, chapped lips, awful posture and manners, you truly would be a good fit for her!”

Finally, the chance came for me to strike again. She was invited to a party, which I, surprisingly, was invited to as well. My six month plan had finally come to a culmination. She was over in a group of seven girls she was confident talking to. She was joking and smiling, her sense of humor obviously a gift in her friends’ eyes. I inhaled what seemed to be the largest amount of oxygen a human could ever take in. I took my first step towards her, or as I like to call it, first base. For some reason, that step somehow caught her attention. She now was looking at me, standing ten feet away. This was the moment I had been longing for. Nervously, I continued walking towards her, hoping to never close the hardest case I had ever accepted.