Love & Books: Judge The One You’re With
27th July, 2009 by Christina - 5 Comments
We’re coming to a close with the Love & Books series with a few more posts this week. I’m hoping to get an email and interview with two potentially great stories to close things out with and a review from Marcelo. Hope you’ve been enjoying all we’ve learned about how books factor in to the love lives of readers.
Our readers have already said that they prefer to date other readers, mostly because reading is a sign that the other person has a curious intellect and reading is a way of continually educating ourselves. So it holds true that if reading says something about a person, what they choose to read says even more.
As mentioned in the previous post, Lizzy made an assumption about John based on a book. In her case she turned out to be correct and the relationship ended up not lasting. Every respondent said that one of the first things they do when at someone’s home for the first time is check out the bookshelf. No one admitted to being a book-snob, but they did talk about the types of books that would make them question the long-term potential of the person in question. Rik, for example, finds Harlequin romance books to be a red-flag.
While Harlequin was mentioned a few times, none of the Stacked readers commented on personal libraries they felt were pretentious. It would seem that while we might raise out eyebrows at someone reading Proust on the subway, we are okay with seeing it on someone’s shelf. The impression I’ve gotten is that avid readers simply are snobs, even if we don’t want to admit it. We are the equivalent of hipsters and their music snobbery–if the masses like it, we don’t. Reading the latest trendy book that had a huge marketing push behind it is one thing; only reading those books means we wonder if the other person has any original taste or personality.
Judgement calls are often based on past experience. For Katie, her questionable content is the result of learning what doesn’t work for her in a relationship,
If they are only into reading business books I get concerned that they might be work obsessed. It’s nice if they are ambitious, but I was once in a long term relationship with a guy who was defined by his work and that ended up being a deal-breaker.
Something that came up often in the results was that people were always looking for their own favorites in other’s collections, almost as if looking for a reflection of themselves in the other person. But no one required that reading styles match up. It seems that we want to find a book or two that connects us but are okay with the other person simply reading, so long as it’s not a large collection of books from our individual danger zone.
The best thing that seems to come from dating someone with different literary tastes is that a whole new world is opened to us as books are recommended, shared, and discussed. Being able to recommend a book and then talk about it seems to be quite the attractive quality–they do not just read books, but participate in them.
Possibly one of the reasons we judge people based on the books we read is that we recognize how books have shaped our perceptions of the world. Similar to the way romantic comedies slightly color how women hope to have their own “meet-cute,” books can do the same, and not just in regard to meeting the love of our lives. We change our eating habits, our politics, our fascination with slugs, and so on because we have a relationship with the books as well as with a gamut of emotions that are manipulated by the words on the page.
Tomorrow,Marcelo is posting a book review that relates to the choices we make and how that affects our love lives. The book is just another example of the power of the written word and how books make us stop and think about our lives. We find other readers interesting and engaging because they too go through their own transformations as books teach them about who they are and what kind of person they want to be.
UPDATE: Reagan just sent me a link to a March 2008 New York Times article discussing people’s perceptions of potential dates based on book choices. Great read.
