“You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who
spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has
problems with closet space because she has too many books.
Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who
has had a library card since she was twelve.”
You’ve heard of this girl before, her name is Summer or
Alaska or something else that sounds cutesy and different
because she’s always trying to define herself as not
being like ‘other girls’. The girl who reads
doesn’t shop, watch sports, play video games or
anything else that she deems to be beneath her. She buys
books instead of clothes because who needs to be dressed, she
is obviously lying if she says she understands Ulysses and
doesn’t find a strange man sitting down beside her in a
coffeeshop and buying her a drink even though she
doesn’t want one to be predatory behavior. It’s
okay to lie to or fail her because she confuses real life
with fiction, wanting conflict right before the climax and
then a sugar-coated happy ending.
She isn’t a girl at all. She’s an idealized
portrait of the already idealized trope of the manic pixie
dream girl who only exists to serve as a love interest and
teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life’s
many mysteries. Women do not exist to complete you or give
your life meaning. It is not our job to get you to see the
world with ‘renewed eyes’ and we certainly do not
live just for you to project your half-baked obsessive
fantasies on us and then call us foul names when we
don’t fulfill them because excuse us if they’re
your visions and not ours.
And the Girl who Reads is one of the more toxic incarnations
of the MPDG because it tells girls that if we like clothes,
boys, being around our friends, taking pride in our
appearances or anything else that doesn’t seem
‘deep or intellectual’ that we’re catty and
jealous. We’re constantly trying to tell ourselves that
we’re not like the other girls as if there’s
something wrong with them. We all want to seem special and
different and quirky so that we’ll eventually find
someone whose personality quirks align with ours and create a
lasting love affair. The girls who are not like us are called
horrible names and treated like they’re worthless as if
what they choose to do with their life is our decision. And
as girls we cannot help tearing each other down; we see
another girl on the street and think ‘oh she’s
prettier, skinnier, smarter, more popular, more
athletic’.
With the Girl who Reads we measure a person’s worth
based on how many John Green books are on their shelves or if
they enjoy Bukowski. You do not have to be widely read or
able to wax poetic about your favourite author for hours on
end to be intelligent or interesting. But it is not the Girl
who Reads who looks down on the girls who don’t and
labels them as stupid, catty, vain, promiscuous or boring, it
is the people who created the idea of her, they believe that
because she is so deep and mysterious that her special
snowflake syndrome will prevent judgments from being passed
at her. Everybody wants to be different, everybody wants to
be special but let me tell you something. You are exactly
like those other girls; you all are made of the same atoms
that make up the solar system but do not think that because
you have nebulae in your bones that you are better than
anyone else.
I am sick and tired of people romanticizing this belief that
if you don’t read that you’re not worth being
loved. There are countless people I know who don’t like
reading and who are still worth being loved the same amount
as the people who do. Tumblr users say that they want to live
like the Girl who Reads and be suffocated by the amount of
literature they own because clearly book hoarding is the best
way to go. Great for you if you want to find someone who
likes the same things as you to be in a relationship with,
you should want that. But if being a hollowed out shell of a
manic pixie dream girl is your ideal life then you need to
think more about what it means. I refuse to be a blank canvas
on which you draw out all your delusions of what life and
love should feel like according to you. I do not exist to
counterbalance you.
Stop looking for the Girl who Reads because you won’t
find her. There are girls who read but they are not
singularly formed archetypes constructed for your approval.
Stop looking for someone who fits your 27 point idealized
criteria of a person and find someone who’s real.
Nobody ends a date by saying ‘wow I think you’re
great and all but you’ve never read A Farewell to Arms
so it’s not going to work out between us’.
That’s just ridiculous. Date someone who makes you
laugh so hard that you snort soda out of your nose and even
when your shirt is soaked with carbonated bubbles they will
still find you and your laugh cute when nobody else does.
Date someone who understands when you’re upset with
them that you are not just waiting for the plot to advance
because the hero always fails at one point or another. Do not
fail her, do not lie to her, because she won’t think
‘oh boy this is some conflict before the
resolution’ she’ll just think you’re a
jerk. Which you are. Date someone who you can love as a human
and not as a fairytale. A Girl who Reads may be able to give
you a world full of adventure and imagination but you know
who could do that even better? A person who actually loves
you.
And pardon if I’m more than a little irked by the fact
that we can’t even love each other as humans anymore,
pardon if I am a ‘raging feminist harpy’, pardon
if I don’t want to be the dramatic backdrop to your
trials and tribulations, pardon if I would rather people to
see me as a person and not a walking, talking library . But I
am 50 shades of done with the elitist belief that reading
makes you worth more as a person and why is that? Because I
am a girl who reads, I am a girl who writes but most
importantly I am a girl.