I've just read this and thought I'd share it because in a very short space of time, it made me laugh, made me cry, made me hate myself and made me incredibly grateful.
"Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the
weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat,
and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her,
find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are
talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities.
Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night
overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her
in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it
in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment.
Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.
Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and
uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common
ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon
that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets
stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do
little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let
her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the
fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking
collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have
wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth
floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a
beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass
of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her
with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be
overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet
glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it
at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as
if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.
Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house.
Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently.
Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have
a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel
sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks,
as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind.
Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the
girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any
significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and
that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that
nothing ever came of her capacity to love.
Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl
who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a
life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary
that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a
vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an
accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays
claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and
soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate
desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit,
that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.
Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has
taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable
intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows,
and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of
disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the
irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who
reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger
and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on,
run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she
has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided
that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax
that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.
Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the
importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and
the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who
reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement.
But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable
significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid
farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.
Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the
storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the
Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in
the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my
life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the
account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that
her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface
bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am
not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed,
properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the
life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept
nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being
storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train
and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really
hate you."