5 Reasons You Should Never, Ever Date A Fan Of Literature
By Katie Ray
1. They’ll have impossible expectations.
They’ll compare you to the great heroes from their favorite novels. They will demand grand gestures of romance, bravery, and adventure. Who wants to work to meet those standards? Best to find someone who is content with your mediocre, humdrum life. You don’t need to stand out or take risks. These lovers of literature will dissect your actions and question your intentions. They’ll want love stories of suspense and of action. Find someone who appreciates how you play it safe and are content right where you are. A fan of literature will always be nagging you on to the next plot twist or chapter in your own life.
2. They’ll read (yes) into everything.
What you say, what you do, the weather on a particular day, you name it. There are so many damn layers to everything! Can’t you find someone to be with who just unquestioningly accepts things at their face value? There’s not a lesson in everything; just do it. Find someone who will tell you exactly what they want and how they want it. Leave no room for interpretation. Literature fans take what has happened in real life and spin their own ‘what if’ endings to the scenarios at hand; they’ll examine every possible conflict and brace themselves appropriately. Find someone who simply waits for the happy ending.
3. They’ll probably be too dramatic.
Find a more static character – someone with whom you will know exactly what to expect. It’s so much easier that way. They are who they are, and that’s who they’ll remain. Why would you want to bother with someone who is on their own journey, stumbling and making a mess of things? It’s exhausting to keep up with their ever-changing opinions and friends and struggles. People who are fans of literature get far too emotionally invested in make-believe stories; they become dreamers and try to make all these personal connections to fictional people. They’ll fall in love and get their heart broken with the turning of a page. They get their own memories mixed up with those of some protagonist’s because they become so intertwined in the life of someone who doesn’t even exist. Find someone who lives in the real world and only worries about themselves.
4. They’ll waste so much time and space.
These people hoard words – those of authors, poets, and their own – as if the world depends on it. People who are fans of literature take up so much time thinking and using their words to paint intricate scenarios and worlds of their own, you’ll have stand out to get their attention. You’ll see books holding up the furniture in their apartment, picture frames and bookends nestled between the spines of books, the backbone of their lives. These people waste space, crowding their letters on endless pages to remember each experience. Scribbles of chaos – exclamation points, underlining, question marks – litter the compound sentences about their complex lives. They waste time, setting the ideal scene and finding the perfect meaning in their exchanges with you, preferring to take the time to examine things closely, to find the unspoken beauty between the lines. You won’t be able to do one thing without it being documented; find someone who doesn’t pay too much attention to details. Someone who keeps things concise and simple.
5. They’ll worry too much about meaning.
Find someone who prefers to just take life as it comes, easy-peasy. People who are fans of literature are bound to look too closely at common themes in their lives and archetypes of mankind; they’ll make predictions about what’s to come and what people are like. They know too much about human nature. They’ll have had experiences you never have, adventures vicariously lived through characters in books set in far away places; they’ll have lived lives that they crafted with pen to paper, fates they were able to control. They’ll find strange parallelism between their own lives and the paragraphs on a page, already know how certain chapters of their lives will turn out because they’ll have read that ending before. Find someone who doesn’t reflect on their own experiences, who doesn’t need to examine motifs or ironies in their own world, someone who doesn’t question things. Find someone who is happy to skate the surface without worrying about what is dwelling in the deep.