Separating paragraphs in mySQL?

Hello, I have this field filled up from within a text area. Something the same as that on message boards but something that has more characters in it. I have it set to get up to 1500 characters. My main problem is that although I tried inserting separate paragraphs (by pressing the return/enter key when every paragraph gets finished), when I tried viewing them on PHP pages, they still show as one whole paragraph without any line breaks (\n). My question, how can I save the entries on the database and still show the "\n" or next lines, thus being able to separate different paragraphs from each other. thanks in advance. the.sam