A week or so ago, I was reminded of this article due to a conversation I had with my boyfriend. The article itself is fairly ridiculous, though on point to a certain extent—one woman broke up with a man because he liked Ayn Rand too much. It did get me thinking, though; I always thought I would end up with someone who loved books as much as I do. Reading is such a huge part of my life that it was just hard to imagine loving someone who didn’t have that same passion. Instead, I found S., who does math problems for fun.
When we first started dating and friended each other on Facebook, I looked immediately at his info to see what kind of books he was into. “Stoppard, Chaucer, T. S. Elliot, Murakami, Burroughs.” All right, self, I thought, you’ve got enough in common that this shouldn’t be TOO bad. I should have noticed that he spelled Eliot wrong… but to make a long story short, I noticed that he didn’t have the nice collected hardcover of Eliot’s poems that I have loved, and so, when he was graduating college a few months after we started dating, I embarked on a hunt for that book. Five bookstores and a frantic day of searching later, I had it in my hands, and wrote a nice little note on the inside. Two years later, I don’t think he’s ever opened it. And two years later, I found out that he doesn’t like poetry very much… (I guess he’s too much of an engineer.)
“So why did you even say that you liked Eliot if you don’t like poetry and don’t read it at all?” I asked this morning.
“I wanted to find a girl like you,” he said.
That’s an answer I might be able to accept.
a study of reading habits 