Terminalcoffee discussion

A friend shared this with me and I found it worth bringing to TC.

"You Should Date an Illiterate Girl", by Charles Warnke.

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You should date an illiterate girl.

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 a 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 too 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 of 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 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 goddamned 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 of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.


Charles Warnke

Nope. I could never date a girl who didn't read. My wife is an avid reader like I am.

I'm just not compatible with a non reader.

This is great, Phil. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Love the last paragraph especially.

Love.

I loved that.

I have dated women who read and others that don't. I prefer the readers, as they understand the love I have of books. The non-readers become jealous of my time spent with my books.

Also I find a woman reading very sexy!

So true about non-readers becoming jealous of the time spent reading.

Indeed they do, Susan.

The mister reads, but it's all non-fiction technical books & such. As a result he takes a lot of "study breaks"...it's hard to get him to understand that when I'm in my other world, immersed, I don't want him dragging me out of it every 20 minutes. It runs my fun. I think he's starting to get it. :)

Oh, that is the absolutely worst! I do not like to be bothered while reading. And a lot of the time, I am so lost in a book that I am lost to my surroundings. I can't hear anyone talking to me. I zone everything out. Huzzzband HATES it. Why are you ignoring me?!

Duh. I am reading my book!

I don't stand in front of the tv while you watch sports.

I need total concentration while I'm reading. I have to be alone in my reading room in my recliner.

This text is not about who you would or wouldn't date, it is not about books or reading, but about you and your fears regarding a significant other's expectations...can you face them? can you decipher them? can you understand them? finally, are you able to love her?

I beg to differ. His point was clearly that a girl who reads experiences and from those experiences has expectations. Those expectations have potential to spur him on to be more, or dump his arse...

Slight over simplification.

So, where's the contradiction? Your reading is correct, yet the dilemma is his not hers...

It has everything to do with reading and who one would/should date...

Does it? Wiseness takes more than exposure...

Wiseness?

I wouldn't date a girl who didn't read.

Didn't read what?

I don't care if it's a terrible book but as long as they've read something i'm open to sticking around long enough to get them to read something better. I was going to write something rude in the previous sentence but I have my standards and it wasn't funny or shocking enough.

TrollEd.

Misha wrote: "Luana wrote: "This text is not about who you would or wouldn't date, it is not about books or reading, but about you and your fears regarding a significant other's expectations...can you face them?..."

I agree, it's as simple as that; yet you are the one who decides about the degree richness, right? so it is mainly about you, and who you would date depends upon what you can see, understand, cope with

Amelia wrote: "TrollEd."

People, what's wrong with you? Putting people in a box and label them without a second thought?? This is the end of the ability to maintain any relationship, sorry..

Félix wrote: "Wiseness?"

Yes, wiseness...Reading enhances the capacity to analyze, environment supplies the object of analysis, and wiseness gives you the means to handle all these morally. What I really wanted to say is that reading might be necessary, depending on the context, but is by no means enough..

A girl that reads is a secondary, or perhaps even tertiary, consideration. Find someone you connect with, find someone who can see the world through your eyes, find someone you would do anything for, find someone you love. If she reads... that's a plus..

But couldn't at least two of those things (the first two) be connected to her reading or not reading?

That ↑