Don't date a girl who reads — Charles Warnke - think thank thunk 12/20/24, 12:29 PM

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Don't date a girl who reads —

Charles Warnke
Posted 14 years ago
March 2, 2011 at 11:21 AM “You Should Date an Illiterate Girl”, by Charles
Warnke

633906 views 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.

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Don't date a girl who reads — Charles Warnke - think thank thunk 12/20/24, 12:29 PM

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

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Don't date a girl who reads — Charles Warnke - think thank thunk 12/20/24, 12:29 PM

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, 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

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Don't date a girl who reads — Charles Warnke - think thank thunk 12/20/24, 12:29 PM

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

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Don't date a girl who reads — Charles Warnke - think thank thunk 12/20/24, 12:29 PM

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 thoughtcatalog.com

Update: On 16 Sept 2013, this story by Charles

Warnke received 200,000 page views
from reddit.com/r/books. Commenters there
and here are discussing at length the story's
meaning. Someone sent the link to Charles,
and he posted an AMA in r/books. Look for
answers there!

The author's Tumblr, Punctuate This!, mentions

this story is circulating with an alternate ending.
This clipping is the correct ending.

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