On raised standards, bad relationships, and the men who quietly adjusted
I didn’t read when I was a kid, and I didn’t date when I was a teenager. Until I turned twenty I took part in neither, and now at twenty three, I have learned how to balance both.
One night during a lonely December, I scanned my bookshelf and tried to imagine the many worlds it had contained. Dragging my finger along the spines, it paused on A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, a book I had heard so many women describe as “the book that got them back into reading.” I picked it up and read a few pages, and found myself throwing it in my bag. I read it on the bus, on the subway going to school, and while I walked between my classes I found it still lingered on my mind. I remember being in the library and thinking to myself, there is something I crave, but I can’t put my finger on it, only to realize later I had craved the next page, next chapter.
I finished A Court of Thorns and Roses and I fell in love with Rhysand. Buying the next books immediately, I finished the series within a month. I read every series that was trending, from Caraval to The Cruel Prince. When I finally read Sarah J. Maas’ Throne of Glass, I watched Aelin connect with herself in such a deeply difficult way, speaking to her younger self, admitting when she was “lost, and did not know the way,” then getting herself back on her path without help. Aelin reminded me that I could never stray too far from myself, to such a point I would not find my way back.
The pace I was reading at picked up, and what started as absorption, was now bordering escapism. I read late at night, I read early in the morning. I read while I ate, I read while I commuted. Any moments I had free, I had my nose in a book, and I began to notice that I was caring less and less about the world I could actually feel and see. Instead of having fulfilling experiences, I read about them, and somehow that was enough for me. Instead of going on dates and falling in love, I was content as a spectator, living vicariously through the protagonist.
After I had finished Throne of Glass, it took me a while to pick up another book; something inside me shifted. The story began with Celaena Sardothien, a young girl in a slave labour camp, and ended with Aelin Galathynius, a trained assassin, taking back her throne. Maybe it was the transformation, maybe I envied it in a way, but after reading the final book — Kingdom of Ash — I put down the books and decided I wanted to live too.
I wanted to love too.
As my book shelf became temporarily on hold, I stood from my spot warming the bench. I downloaded dating apps and built my profile, a process that made me feel valuable at the time yet in hindsight made me feel more like meat; like the prettiest prized pig.
The first guy I went on a date with wasn’t bad, necessarily. Though what I failed to see at the time, was that I was better. We had similar taste in music and both played the guitar, but he was rude to servers and didn’t tip.
The next guy I went out with wasn’t any better. He made fun of me in a way that I justified as banter, he put in little to no effort to see me; mocking me for even expecting him to. In some twisted, enemies to lovers way, I made sense of it.
Later, and for the third time now, I found myself with the wrong man. Though this situation differed from the rest; where the other men saw the gap and wanted to find a new connection with a smaller one, this man saw the gap and thought it was the perfect place to hide his secrets. While the men before grew tired of me — a blessing in disguise — to my disfortune, this man wanted to keep me.
In the beginning I told my friends he felt like he was straight out of a book; as if he were written by a woman. When we sat next to each other at the dinner table, he would pull my chair closer to his, tucking me between his legs. He would stand behind me at times, massaging my shoulders, kissing the top of my head. When he poured me a glass of wine and buttered a piece of bread for me before serving himself first, I was pulled back to Wrath and Emilia in Kingdom of the Wicked, remembering how I appreciated the way Wrath always tended to her first.
As time passed, I began to notice the way his behavior differed in front of others and behind closer doors. When he massaged my shoulders and fed me bread in front of his parents, when he kissed my head tenderly in front of his friends. When he wanted to give me my christmas gift early, so my family could watch as I opened the gold watch and bracelet. When he screamed at me in the car, swerving through the street until he deemed the spark of fear in my eyes sufficient. When he justified his cheating, as if he wouldn’t have done it if I had been both less, and more.
When I read Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho in the car on the way to his cottage, I lied when he asked what it was about. I didn’t know how to explain the message to him in a way that wouldn’t implicate him; the way the book spoke about pleasure and pain, and how they should never coexist, while in our relationship, were codependent.
When he forbade me from reading Eat, Pray, Love, I knew I had to. When he worried because "women read this book to find themselves,” I was only more eager to search. When I tried to calm his nerves, when I told him “we can survive a book, babe,” I knew we couldn’t, I knew we wouldn’t, and I broke up with him before Elizabeth Gilbert reached Indonesia.
I barely read while I was with him. I knew what the books would tell me, but I wasn't ready to hear it. So I kept the books at a distance, and compared him to what I could remember of them instead. Memory was easier to argue with than ink.
I read again when I finally felt safe enough to. Not safe from him. Safe enough to look. But I never finished Eat, Pray, Love; it had already served its purpose.
I am no longer the woman who disappeared into these books. I am the woman who reads them with her feet tucked under her on the couch, or in bed beside someone new, who makes the real world worth returning to — someone who, without having read a single page, somehow outweighs every man on them.
I couldn't always tell the difference; between a man who pulls your chair closer in front of his parents and one who does it when no one is watching; between a man who tends to you first because he wants to be seen doing it, and one who does it because it doesn't occur to him not to. The books didn't teach me what a good man looked like. They taught me to keep looking until I could tell on my own.
