title: Synthetic Love
author: Hart, Christina
description: Alan Shaden may look like your average Tinder crush – 6’2”, dark hair, dark eyes, dimples – but with his rugged exterior comes a soft and battered heart, and his biggest secret (literally), which he keeps hidden in the back of his closet. Alan doesn’t stop to think he’s a sex addict until a therapist deems him one, but that’s right before they have sex in her office. Alan isn’t the best man. He’s the first to admit it, but he’s trying to be better. It’s not easy having good intentions and compulsive desires at the same time. As Alan’s layers peel away, you come to know the worn soul beneath the man. The traumatic childhood tragedies that have made him this way. A troubled past can shape you, or break you, and Alan is teetering somewhere in between. But he’s a gentleman at heart, hiding a dark past, and a life-size, synthetic secret. Sabrina is a doll. She can’t move. She can’t talk. She can’t kiss Alan back like a real woman can. She can’t even tell him she loves him. But what she can do for him is something no woman has ever done before: she can stay. Who said love had to be with a real person for it to be real?