On Books (Part Eight)

I read too many books. I counted (hehe) and discovered that I have read over 60 this year, and that number includes some incredibly long ones.

The other day I was conversing with a girl who asked me if I'd ever been in love ... with someone real. As in, not a fictional character I read about in a book. Ouch.

I'm not offended that she said that, but I always thought it was rather obvious that I understood the difference between book men and real men. I've never fallen in love with a fictional character. For instance, I've never considered myself the sort of woman who dreams of finding her very own Mr. Darcy. And as much as I love Jane Eyre, I was all about being happy that Jane and Rochester ended up together, and nothing about wishing I could be her and have a man like that. Fictional men do not make me sigh with longing, and it never occurs to me to wish that real men were in any way like the fabricated men in literary endeavors.

The truth is that I hold men to a higher standard than what is normally expected of them—or at least, I hold them to that standard if I have any plans of making them a part of my life. They rarely measure up. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with the underdeveloped men in books written by women whose concept of the ideal man was not entirely in sync with my own. Frankly, the man I'm going to marry will be a thousand times better than Mr. Darcy, if only for the reason that he has to have rare abilities indeed if he's going to consider falling in love with me. I'm not trying to put myself down when I say that there are hardly any men out there who would see anything in me worth paying attention to, much less falling in love with. I am not Elizabeth Bennett—she is also a fictional character.

I have had to deliberately curb my imagination in trying to come up with the ideal husband, because in addition to the fact that the ideal husband doesn't exist, there is also the glaringly obvious point that even if he did, he wouldn't want me. And to try to imagine a future with a perfect man would be rather dangerous anyway. I always thought it was a silly idea that, back when we were teenagers in church they wanted us to do things like make A LIST.

I understand why it was done, but I remember that when I made my LIST, it was brief and to the point. I wanted a man who was righteous and kind, preferably tall. Then one of the advisors got ahold of my LIST and contributed her own addenda, including handsome, charming, funny, and some other stuff. Really? My life is not, and never has been, a storybook. It's only in bad romance novels that a girl who has average looks, average intelligence, and a lot of insecurities in addition to extreme hereditary timidity ends up with the guy who is tall, dark, handsome, charming, and funny, as well as good and kind and annoyingly selfless. I was actually taking my assignment seriously.

And I hate bad romance novels.

Equally as passionately, I hate bad mystery novels. You know, the kind where there's not a single person in the book that you actually like, and every upper-class female character has an aquiline nose and an angelic profile; where the criminal actually ends up looking rather tame compared to the people who were innocent ... or even worse, the people you really liked turn out to be the vilest ones in the end.

If life were like one of those books, I'd never want to get married because I'd be sure that ten years later my husband would turn out to be an axe murderer, or worse.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that as much as I do love books, I hope I don't have any misconceptions about real life due to my love for them. There's plenty of room in my life to accommodate both imagination and reality.