I always thought there were certain things that only happened on TV, things we have just accepted for fifty years without worrying about them, like spit-takes, or double-takes. Or robbers who show up at exactly the time the fake robbers, who got caught in traffic, were supposed to show up so the wimpy guy can look like a hero. Or people who say, “it’s not you, it’s me,” or “I think we should just be friends,” or “I need some space” when breaking off a relationship. Or Christmas tree lights that work fine until everyone leaves the room, at which point they suddenly burst into flames. Or people who hear a piece of a conversation and mistakenly conclude their best friend is pregnant, and then subsequently throw a baby shower for the friend, who was actually just talking about the new towels she’s buying for her parents.

So when a young woman whom I had been dating for a while told me, “What I’m looking for right now is a friend.” I suddenly felt like Zack being dumped by Kelly on Saved by the Bell.

“I hope we can be friends, too,” I said, incredulous that I said it. Then I hung up the phone and thought, “Wait a minute! That doesn’t happen in real life. I’m not on television!” She doesn’t actually want to be friends, and neither do I, but she doesn’t want to date me, either. And damn it, whatever the problem is, it definitely isn’t her, it is me!

Later that night I realized this incident was part of a pattern. I was walking up Willoughby Avenue in Brooklyn and a man approached me with that look that says, “Hey, you look like a Pez dispenser. Give me stuff.”

“Hey, man, can I ask you something? I’m not begging for money or anything like that.” So, I thought, no one’s going to be straight with me tonight. The man went through his sad story, how he needed to get a bus back home because he was stuck in the city, and by the end I actually believed him. I reached into my pocket and gave him three of my hard-earned dollars and shook his hand and wished him good luck.

And then when I turned away, I realized what had just happened. He lied and I bit. I went for the bait, just like I and thousands of people every day don’t get on the subway train because the person on the P.A. assures us “there’s another train right behind this one.” There isn't another train right behind it. I can understand that they don't want the trains to be overcrowded, but they're still lying. And we believe them. I believe them. Just like we believe all those companies that tell us their designer water will help us sleep, or stay awake, or get thinner, or bulk up. I admit it: I’ve drunk my share of trendy herbal cure-alls like guarana and ginkgo and Echinacea, even though I’m pretty sure it’s all just four dollar tap water.

Why do I do these things? Why do we all play into the hands of the dishonest, manipulative people out there in the world? It’s because deep down, we want it to all be true. And we’ll believe anything if we want it enough. We hold out hope until the last second that that next train will come and it will be empty and clean and will whisk us away to work in a fraction of the usual time. We try to believe she wants to be friends, that it was timing and nothing about either of us as people that doomed the relationship. We want to sympathize with the poor schmuck from out of town and do whatever we can to help him. We want the magic water to cure all our ailments and make us better people.

We actually do want our lives to be poorly scripted sitcoms, where all of our problems are solved in thirty minutes and everything has a musical cue, because we were trained to see life that way by fake television. I guess I really do think I’ll be saved by the bell. Now I’m just worried that I’ll wake up and discover I’m Screech.