catastrophe

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 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 get 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 as 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, god 
damnit, 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 the 
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 god damned 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 
that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept 
nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of 
being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next 
southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I 
really, really, really hate you.


—via CHARLES WARNKE.