There was once a girl who was responsible for how I perceived love. Prior to her, the girls I had been with were great, but never really shared my core passions. This girl was different, though. She loved video games, weird humor and great music. This girl was geeky, sarcastic and the first girl I ever loved.

Of course like most relationships, it didn’t last. The breakup shook me to my core, and as a result, I started unfairly comparing every girl I met to my old love. All of a sudden, romance had a statistics sheet. New romantic prospects would be put through a checklist of whether or not they liked certain pieces of entertainment and shared certain personality traits. This led to a long drought of loneliness on my part because no one could compare.

This happened for a long time. And, in fact, it wasn’t until recently that I learned an important lesson: Love is more than just someone’s favorite movie.

All of us have a type. It can be as general as “I want a girl who’s nice” to “I want an emotionless mathematics major with no personality and a $6 haircut.” But for some of us, it’s specific items. I’m sure there are a lot of you out there who couldn’t date someone who liked country music. That’s fine, and I’m totally in agreement. But if we’re on a date and someone said that they haven’t seen “Arrested Development,” then we shouldn’t completely write them off as being undateable.

It’s good to have standards, but we can’t expect every girl to match 100 percent to some silly ideal in our head. This past month has been interesting for me in how I’ve started to see love. I’ve learned that what truly matters is the little day-to-day stuff.

For me, at least, I feel like the older I get, the fewer people I have a connection with. And that connection is what matters. It’s not the sex or what they like to do on a Saturday night; it’s about whether or not you can talk to them about whatever. That’s the best part about love: being able to text the person at noon about what you just ate for lunch, or having someone to vent to about that kid you hate in class.

Honestly, no one cares about our lives. We’re all self-absorbed brats. But when you feel those water bed ripples deep inside you, when you honestly and fully care about what’s going on in that other person’s life — well, that’s important. And if they care about all your boring day-to-day stuff, then you shouldn’t close your eyes to the fact just because of some stupid TV show.

All the stuff we like in life is just person-salt; extra flavor that make us who we are. We shouldn’t fall in love with that. We should fall in love with people and who they are and what they mean to us. That feeling of caring about another person is extremely rare these days. Look at your life and think of a person you couldn’t go a day without. Even if they don’t match up exactly to whom you thought you’d fall for, take off your blinders anyway, and give them a chance.

I love Wes Anderson films as much as the next guy, but don’t make something as shallow as that your criteria for love. There are far more important things. In the end, the person you can fart in front of and talk about stupid stuff with is the one you should be with.