30th
This thing looks like that thing
In Sunday’s Book Review, Rachel Donadio tackles that age-old question of dating dealbreakers:
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)
Funnily, it’s so age-old that I wrote almost the exact same piece nearly two years ago in the Observer:
“If a girl puts down that her favorite book is The Fountainhead, there’s no way I’m going to contact her,” said a 30-year-old law student, quaffing a beer in the garden of an out-of-the-way Williamsburg bar called Lockinn, which features Scrabble-inlaid tables and a large barbecue grill. His friends—many of them fellow veterans of the New York online dating scene—nodded in agreement.
Later, over lunch at an Upper West Side falafel joint near his apartment, the law student clarified his position. “I’ve never actually read The Fountainhead,” he said between bites. “It’s an unspecific thing. It just kind of comes from the belief that a mixture of someone being philosophical but not very bright seems dangerous.” And Objectivists the world over cried a little bit inside.
The somewhat arbitrary nature of the law student’s preferences, however, belies a more significant point—significant, at least, for the thousands of unattached New Yorkers who have been turning to the Internet to find love (or, failing that, sex) for many years now . The decision to reject someone’s online profile is made in minutes, if not seconds, and it’s often due to these deal-breakers—cultural red flags that pop up in categories as seemingly harmless as the Favorite Books category.
Ah well. I guess some ideas really are eternal! Especially regarding the Fountainhead.