This column contains Sex and the City movie spoilers. You’ve been warned.

After the messy wedding fiasco and ensuing reconstruction of Carrie Bradshaw in the Sex and the City movie, she sits alone in front of her computer on New Year’s Eve with one word typed on her screen.

“Love.”

She adds ellipses, but then she backspaces to the period.

This column began mentally in much the same way as I was traveling home last Thursday night after spending an evening with James, who, after much thought, I’ve casually started referring to as my British beau. We went to the National Portrait Gallery, shopping a little and then sat cuddling in Hyde Park until after sunset.

Now, I’m not one to prematurely utter those three powerful words to merely anyone, and as this column goes to press, I’ve not brought this up directly with James. Love is such a fickle idea, an immediately unsure step. But when it happens, when it truly happens, you really can’t ignore it or discredit it – it is, unwavering and steadfast.

I’m typically too logical, like Miranda, or sexual, like Samantha, to genuinely let myself be swept away by something so greeting card, like Charlotte. Many of my friends would easily categorize this little jaunt along these lines: “Cold-hearted cynic mistakes yet another casual fling as something more than a fleeting fuck that has no chance to blossom.” I know this. As I sat on the train contemplating whether to reveal James as simply a British crush, I had a realization that I’d been waiting for since I arrived here: Who cares?

When we fall in love, we do it selfishly. We are we because we want to be. James and I aren’t even a we. But does that make any feelings we have for each other less valid? As with most everything in my life, this two week thing has taught me to be even more selfish when it comes to love. Love is something you can only give. You can try to take it back, but once you give it, you’ve given a part of yourself that can never totally be yours again. You can love others and many, but each of them takes a part of you that will never completely be free of said loved one ever again. It’s a no returns, no exchanges transaction. Each and every love is a tale worthy of the ages.

“Some love stories aren’t epic novels. Some are short stories,” Carrie says near the end of Sex and the City. “But that doesn’t make them any less filled with love.”

Who’s to say what love is or isn’t? Do we reference the great love letters of men like Beethoven and Voltaire as Carrie does in the film? Or is love such an individual, yet mutually shared experience, and attempting to generalize its style and reality too impossible a task?

I came to London to work at Harper’s Bazaar, formerly Harper’s and Queen, one of the oldest and most reputable fashion magazines in the world. On my second day of work, I handled a $2,000 Yves Saint Laurent jacket to return to a publicity house. It was remarkable and yet a total letdown. I’d always dreamed that handling such expensive clothing would invoke some kind of amazing visceral reaction.

I didn’t find what I was looking for in any of the boutiques I visited for my job. I found what I came to London for in a boy named James. I found a sense of self-validation paired simultaneously with even more self-doubt. And I found love – which as Carrie, who gets her logical, sexual and greeting card in the course of two hours, tells us in the last line of the movie, is “one label that never goes out of style.”

Adam Griffiths is a junior visual journalism major and a columnist for the Summer Kent Stater. Contact him at .

Check out his blog of his trip to London at adamacrossthepond.blogspot.com.