Text and the single-ish girl grad student

See, now, I know this New York Times essay about making decisions about romantic partners based on the contents of their libraries is supposed to be aimed at people like me. And, given that it's the most emailed article at the moment, it's clearly working on some level. And I won't say that I didn't put a bit of thought into how my bookshelves are arranged in my apartment, and I won't say that when I was in college I never slept with a dude because of his books, and I won't pretend that books didn't figure rather heavily into my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. And, okay, there was that one moment with K where he was over here and said in this kind of plaintive what-if voice, "we even have the same books"--and I'd be lying if that wasn't one of those things that made me think (wrongly, as it appears) that we could be friends after the whole kind of sketchy affair thing was over.

However. I still affirm that some of the best sex I've ever had in my life was with The Lawyer, a man who owns almost no books. Like, I think I saw maybe three in his apartment in all the times I was over there, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them was one that I brought and took with when I left. A younger version of myself would have found this to be anathema to everything I stood for, and I have to say that I had at least a moment of pause when I realized that. (It's not like he didn't read things ever--he is a pretty big-deal lawyer and reads a lot for a living. He also told me once that he has some books in storage.) But I got over it and at some point realized it was kind of hot, especially coming off things with my Ex. (Those of you who know him know what I'm talking about.) And I don't think it's just me, either. As far as I know, most of the women that The Lawyer (you know what, let's just call him E) dated from Nerve were academics in one way or another; if I'm remembering correctly, he ended up dumping me for an art history professor. And we had a conversation once where I told him my theory about how all these academic women were attracted to him because having sex in a room without books in it was probably dirty-hot for a lot of us.

It is more than that, though. The one comment in the Times article that totally makes sense is the one about how shared books can generate a false sense of shared ideas:

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

I mean, there's something to be said for someone who gets a lot of your references and all. The Professor and I started hanging out together because we could talk Derrida together and shared an appreciation for a certain Victorian novelist who isn't Dickens. In general, though, and especially with men who are not themselves academics, books can be more trouble than they're worth. Obviously, I would like to end up with a dude who does more than watch Rock of Love all day. (On the other hand, I completely prefer the elliptical machine near the TV playing Rock of Love to the elliptical machine where I'm left to the company of my New Yorker when I'm at the gym.) And obviously, I don't want to have to continually defend my reading at all to someone. But that's not the experience I had, at least not on the internet. What I got from Nerve were all these guys who weren't academics but kind of wanted to be and to some extent were crazier autodidacts than I was, and with me this translated into an alternation of fetishizing what I do for a living (is what I do for a living kind of cool and awesome all the time? Yeah. Is it also just another profession among many, and one with perhaps more of its share of demands and ridiculous hoops? Yeah.) and giving off the impression that I am somehow falling short of their expectations because I don't want to be cool and literary all the time. People who mostly know me in academic and other mostly non-sexual contexts are always surprised when I tell them that there's a group of dudes in the world who find me shallow--these are often the same dudes who buy me a drink and expect me to validate them for reading Moby-Dick. Have I read Moby-Dick? Yes, I have. Do I need to troll the internet for strangers with whom to discuss it? No.

I do know a lot of my personal reaction to this has to do with the specific terms of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend and especially the pressures he put on me because I was doing something that he, through an unfortunate convergence of circumstances and bad planning, couldn't pull off himself. In a broader sense, though, I think I spent so much time in high school and college pushing people off because I wasn't sure that they only liked me for my mind that I ended up making my life then much harder than it needed to be. I'm more comfortable with being liked for other reasons now, and I'm trying at least in a halfhearted way to keep those other reasons in play. (Ironically, I only really shop when I'm depressed, so I haven't bought anything in awhile. I should be able to justify something for the Toronto trip, though.) I joke that the longer I spend in grad school, the more vain that I get. It's not totally a joke, it's more a combination of trying to control the few things I can control and of still finding it wonderful not to have my Ex putting pressure on me all the time.

With that being said, I should finish making my presentation assignment handout and contemplate a trip to the gym tomorrow. I didn't go at all last week, and I'm sure that's partly why I got so damn manic.