Via Justine De Fant

I’ve read “You Should Date An Illiterate Girl,” and “Date a Girl Who Reads” and now I come to you, bold letters and hands to hip to say, “Don’t date a girl who reads.” 

Don’t date a girl who reads.

A girl who reads will know if you’ve really read Pride and Prejudice or if you’ve lazily googled the summary on SparkNotes. She won’t be impressed by the way you understand the symbolism in Animal farm because it’s already painfully obvious. She knows Romeo isn’t a figure of love and that Gatsby didn’t need Daisy, he needed a therapist. A girl who reads might love Heathcliff but she also understands that his deep and brooding nature is unactualized potential and that his codependence on Catherine hinders him from healing his own childhood trauma. 

Don’t date a girl who reads if she’s gone through all 585 pages of Moby Dick. She can tell when a climax is not worth the endless chapters of exposition and will not wait for you to take action. And if she’s versed in Morrison, well good luck, because she knows not to fall in love, but to rise in it. She’s read long books and short ones and knows when a story should’ve ended pages ago (Read: The Old Man and the Sea) so don’t draw out the tension if the resolution is mediocre. She will grow bored, steal the pen away and write her own ending. She’s read and reread the most divinely crafted proclamations of devotion, ones that have been dog-eared, wrapped in Hughes’ blue cloud-cloth and crafted to syntactic perfection. She’s read these passages so often that she’s ingrained them in her memories and houses red alarms in her heart that are triggered when someone comes close to reciting them. So don’t be discouraged when she’s unmoved by your “hey, u up?” text at 3 in the morning.

When Venus tells Adonis to “stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie,” a girl who reads knows Shakespeare is talking about oral sex. She is well versed in fuck boy rhetoric of all kind. She does not want the illusion of selflessness cast over the “you deserve better” cliché. She’d rather have the unconditional love between James Carstairs and Will Herondale.

A girl who reads will want a Luve that she can fold into a red, red rose or write into a sonnet and she wants a heartbreak that has her crumbling into oblivion or shouting into the void because she knows that a perfect love is boring to read. She craves dynamism, multiple climaxes in one story, oscillating periods of passion and discontent and knows that the initial wave of infatuation often gives way to a period of indifference held together by an implicit contract of loyalty and commitment, but that it’ll rise into another crescendo if both characters are patient and determined enough. A girl who reads doesn’t revel in stagnant waters, she rushes towards the waves, towards the other shore Márquez has promised. She knows that that real love isn’t just one or the other, it’s everything–– it is all of it.

You cannot offer the world to a girl who reads. She has gone beyond the white, male pages of the canon and travelled with Hosseini and Lispector, with Pavlova and Tan and Tolkien and knows when to romanticize the world and when to live in it. She’ll read Hurston, and Roy, and Allende and despair when she realizes that Kerouac’s fabulous yellow roman candle-lit night is not the same tainted midnight as Laurie Anderson’s. A girl who reads is not a coffee stained manuscript waiting for your eyes to rove over her at a cafe. She does not fill her shelves with de Beauvoir and Wild and Walker so that you can idealize her into an overdone trope. She does not want the responsibility of opening your eyes to a new world and is not filled with hidden messages waiting for you to annotate between the lines. A girl who reads couldn’t care less if you’re enchanted with the way she smells the pages of a book or runs her fingers through the deckled edges.

She is bold, sans serif font underlined and italicized to her own liking. 

But don’t date a girl who doesn’t read, either.

A girl who doesn’t read might choose to buy a dress or a new pair of shoes instead of a first edition Vonnegut. She’ll zone out at poetry readings or drift into a daydream at the first page of Hunger Games but come alive when you flip to the Western Conference. She might even use a paperback copy of King as a doorstop.

And you know what all this will tell you? Nothing.

It will tell you that it doesn’t matter if a girl would rather spend her Saturday nights drunk and celebrating the beauty of another woman she just met in the bathroom or if she can shotgun a beer faster than the post-nut clarity after your 7 minutes of mediocre performance can hit you. It doesn’t matter that she can’t stylistically analyze a single page of The Sound and the Fury and that she cannot be romanced with Neruda or Pound because she, too, will not be not swayed by your rehearsal of another man’s words and empty declarations of commitment without action.

Maybe she doesn’t read literature or critique the classics, but that doesn’t mean she lacks the intellectual capacity to have deep discussions on politics or existentialism, that she cannot color your life with more shades of cerulean than the Pacific Ocean. She won’t recognize Woolf or Dickinson but she’ll still demand passion and wonder and will see right through any shallow understanding of love and womanhood that many have painfully attempted to categorize under literate and illiterate. She, too, will despise the way others correlate her intellect with the number of books on her shelves and scoff at the way women have been grouped and pitted against one another in outdated binaries.

And in that moment, you’ll find that a girl who doesn’t read can be just as formidable as one that does, that there is no hidden value to be found in a girl that reads that cannot be found in one that doesn’t, that philosophies and values learned through text are not inherently superior to those formed by experience alone.
And when you realize this surface-level perception of literacy and of women is a fragile pairing wrought from a dirt stained lens, it will intimidate you and it will destroy you. 

So if this is how you view us, don’t date a girl who reads.
Don’t date a girl who doesn’t read.
In fact, don’t date a girl at all.
None of us want you.

Note: I actually really enjoyed reading “Date and Illiterate Girl.” I appreciate it’s purposeful diction and beautifully crafted syntax and understand the piece for what it is. “Date a Girl Who Reads” was kind of cringe-y at some parts, but there were passages I identified with. So consider my piece as not an attack to these respective authors but a response to all the boys who’ve labeled me and many other women as “coffee shop girls” or a “party girls” without understanding that these designations are empty labels devoid of any true substance, that it disregards the multitudinous identities a woman can adopt.