Nadine Zylberberg | Playing house

I harbor a deep-rooted resentment toward unwarranted capitalization and hyperbole. Anyone acquainted with the Craigslist apartments section will know it is teeming with both.

For a few weeks, a friend and I scrolled through dozens of listings, contacted countless real estate brokers and made a decisively sketchy list of both before finally boarding a bus to New York to find our first apartment.

“Oh my GoOdneSS – live like a gOdeSS”

“STOP UR SEARCH!! UWS it doesn’t get better HAVE U SEEN THIS??”

And my personal favorite, the ever-comforting, “There’s still room for you in Manhattan” — complete with dark wood cabinetry and black granite finish.

Friends and family wondered what had us running to New York weeks earlier than any broker deemed necessary. Perhaps it was the opening scene of “Tiny Furniture,” in which a young Lena Dunham is on the ultimate walk of shame: back to her parents’ apartment, jobless, after graduating from a liberal arts college.

In Dunham’s defense, census stats attest that the boomerang phenomenon isn’t all too uncommon and, these days, is not as stigmatized.

Still, we were relentless. We would find the three-bedroom, practically free, gut-renovated godsend of an apartment that we were certain existed under a pile of overpriced dregs.

Needless to say, there was no such place.

I attribute this disillusionment to my tendency to take movies and television shows to heart. In this case, “Friends” is the primary suspect. The long-lived sitcom and cultural landmark ushered in the new urban family, one in which friends co-habitate, laugh, cry and even marry — mostly within the confines of an airy Greenwich Village apartment.

“Friends” also paved the way for “How I Met Your Mother,” which, in its ninth and final season, extends the myth of the affordable, yet massive, Manhattan dwelling into the 21st century. Forever embalmed in Netflix marathons and TNT re-runs, these shows provided a blueprint for what I imagined urban life to be.

It only took nine hours and 22 apartment viewings to change my mind.

I can now measure 600 square feet blindfolded and have become a self-proclaimed architect, deciding that three rooms can surely be created from one.

Perhaps sitcom-esque friendships are enduring and real, but the space in which they are cultivated is not. In the words of one broker we professed our dream life to, “I hope your boyfriend is very rich.”

Since I was a child, the adult world I never knew has consisted of pantyhose, black coffee, real estate and spreadsheets. And since graduation seems an adequate entry point into this world, I expected our search to be mostly a back-and-forth between adults.

But in the world of New York real estate, we found ourselves reduced to toddlerhood. We crawled toward the shiniest objects in the room and scanned legal documents doe-eyed. At one showing, we sat Indian-style on the floor, feigning interest in the broker on the opposite side of the room, but really just picturing how a taupe L-shaped couch would look in the corner behind him.

And then the much-anticipated reality check came hurtling toward us in the form of “guarantor,” “pressurized wall” and the like. These words are hardly glamorous, and as far as we were concerned, hardly English.

We went to New York with the unbridled gusto of two kids playing house. By the end of the day, the truth of the matter wasn’t lost on us, nor on the real estate agents vying for our dime: we’re young, overstepping our budgets and waddling our way into maturity. And so it was only appropriate that one broker buy his way into our hearts in the form of frozen yogurt.

Adulthood doesn’t come with a gown and tassel. And it certainly doesn’t come with a 2,000-square-foot apartment overlooking Madison Square Park. It’s an entire process, and perhaps that was what scared me most.

We finished our subsidized Pinkberry and headed back to the bus, pockets replete with flyers and floor plans and business cards. Somewhere along the way, our naivete had fallen out and we found ourselves talking about “guarantors” and “pressurized walls” like the rest of them. But I’m confident we’ll pick it back up the next time around — and I hope so, too. I’d hate to lose it forever.

Nadine Zylberberg is a College senior from Boca Raton, Fla. Her email address is nadinezylber@gmail.com. Follow her @nadine_zyl. “twentysomething” appears every other Thursday.

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