5 Reasons Why People Who Love Books Should Love Each Other
In the massive resurgence of rom-com popularity, there has been one particular subgenre I’ve happily watched explode and that is books about people who love books. From Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegmund-Broka’s The Roughest Draft to Jasmine Guillory’s upcoming By the Book, this hyper-meta subset of romantic comedies has taken off, and as both a reader and a writer, I couldn’t be any happier.
Love stories about book lovers aren’t new either. Modern classics like You’ve Got Mail and Notting Hill leaned into their charming bookstore settings in a way that cements their rewatchability: It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen these movies. You want to return to them for their coziness and familiarity. To me, the best explanation for this phenomenon is that in the Venn Diagram of book lovers and utter romantics, the overlap is substantial.
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And being a person who sits squarely in that overlap, there’s something so appealing about a love story between two people who love books as much as I do, an instant relatability, sure, but also a believability. It just makes sense for people who love books to fall in love with each other. Here are some reasons why.
A never-ending supply of conversation
Art imitates life and life imitates art, and all this is to say, there’s nothing quite so delightful in a fictional or real-life romance as a conversation partner who can hold their own. When you both love books, you’ll never run out of things to talk about. If you prefer different genres, you get to tell each other the full plot of books. If you prefer the same genre, you’ve got a two-person book club.
You can gush over the stories you both love, and you can argue over the ones on which your opinions diverge. As a reader, nothing makes me buy into a potential romance between characters more quickly than a sense that the leads would never run out of things to say to one another.
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An empathetic partner
Research suggests that reading increases empathy. No matter how different two people are, if they’re both avid readers, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be able to put themselves in the other’s shoes. And if they read romance specifically, then they’ve probably come to truly loathe easily avoided miscommunications (which often leads to a third-act breakup), and thus they have no excuse not to be highly, thoroughly, and quickly communicative in any given situation!
Decent chance they smell good
I shouldn’t really have to explain this one. Books smell good. Get you a partner who smells like warm paper.
A tried-and-true go-to date
There’s nothing I like so much as going to dinner, having a glass of wine, and then immediately heading to the nearest bookstore. Although a close second-place is doing all the same food-centric things and then going grocery shopping in an empty Friday-night Trader Joe’s. But being in a bookstore, with a full belly and someone you love, is a special kind of heaven.
It just makes sense for people who love books to love each other, because then, even when you do force yourself into stiff pants and out your front door, you can still spend your date nights in the cozy comfort of a bookstore.
You can always be alone, together
Of course, not every book lover is an introvert, but even those of us who are more social know that when you’re deep in a story, it’s nearly impossible to pull yourself away. Plans get canceled. Dinner gets ordered instead of made. Toes are badly stubbed as you move around the house, book in your face and eyes still on the page. It’s easy to feel like nothing else matters, but then you look, and you realize it’s fully nighttime, you haven’t turned any lights on, and you haven’t spoken to anyone in two days.
But imagine this: You close your book. You take a deep breath. And when you look up, the love of your life is there on the other side of the couch, brow furrowed and concentration fully fixated on their own book. What could be better than that? Someone who knows what it is to get lost in pages, to live a whole other life in a whole other world for days at a time?
And maybe that’s why writers and readers alike have been gravitating toward this kind of love story between book lovers lately. Because there is a kind of peace and comfort in not having to explain this irrepressible and somewhat impractical part of yourself. Well, that and the warm paper smell.
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