And no, I don’t want to give you any recommendations.
Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed
If I get one more message saying "So, does Harry Potter count?" I'm quitting OkCupid.
When I rejoined the dating site after a breakup last winter, I added a line to the bottom of my profile: "You should message me if: not every book in your favorites section is by a dude." And message me they have. I've become something of an inadvertent confessor for the book-reading single male population of New York City. This is not a job anyone should want and I absolutely brought it on myself.
Not much changed on OkCupid in the two years I was away. Still the infinite scroll of goofy photographs ("like Amazon but for humans," a friend once said), still the barrage of copy-pasted message, still the same survey questions just this side of painfully self-conscious. The app lives on my phone now instead of my computer, easier to thumb through in the bathroom and pass around to friends when I get an especially graphic or typo-riddled message. I don't use it well or often; I go months without thinking to check my inbox, weeks without replying to even the most promising people. But just knowing it's there has been a source of comfort, a tiny well I can lower a bucket into on nights when I need some possibility.
When I reactivated my account, I purged the outdated answers on my profile. I'm no longer a "recent graduate" and not enough of a Downton Abbey diehard to list it among my favorite shows. I deleted entire question fields and got rid of all the photos where my hair was so short I'd had to learn to shave the back of my own neck. And then I came to "You Should Message Me If." I'd never had an answer before, figuring it was pretty self-evident — "you would like to make out a bunch" — but this time around I decided to write about the unbearable exclusivity of dude-books.
Almost immediately after changing my profile, I started to get apologies.
Alanna Okun
The word "counts" has appeared in my inbox over and over again. (Probably second only to "nudes??") And I get the logic: Here I am, introducing this ~rule~ that many guys have never even considered, and they want to know if they're following it. Who hasn't wanted guidance like that, especially when it comes to something as fraught and fragile as dating? The flaw, of course, is that this thinking is in line with the idea that you can build up credit in exchange for someone's attention, that if you get enough Good Guy Points™ you can cash them in for dinner and a movie. (Each Karen Russell book is worth 10 points, btw, and movies are terrible first dates.)
And then there are the messages asking for recommendations. "You're not the first person to comment about guys only listing male authors," one boy wrote me. "I'm guilty of that, and it's kind of embarrassing. Any suggestions for me?" I get at least one of these a week and even though they're wholly well intentioned, I don't answer. Because... the internet exists! Because is this really the first time in your two (or, heaven forbid, three) literate decades on this planet that it's occurred to you to seek out brain padding by AN ENTIRE HALF of the population? Because you can do that very small amount of work on your own, or at least ask anyone in your life besides some random dyed-redhead on OkCupid to give you a hand.
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I'm Not Interested In Guys Who Don't Read Books By Women