It had been years since I’d consciously given up on romantic love, romance was frowned upon in every other area of life so why should love be any different?  It took a lot of hard work but I slowly trained myself out of all my fleeting, presumptuous and self important romantic instincts.  I reshaped myself over the course of six years to be a well-oiled, productive, efficiency-oriented creature; every morning I’d eat cheerios with raisins and bananas, the banana cut exactly into seven pieces and no more than eleven raisins.