Literary interests are a green flag for those looking for a partner with curiosity and communication skills — or just the ability to put down the phone.
Jordan Lindsey, a 31-year-old who works at a youth development nonprofit, tries to read in the morning — before work or, occasionally, on the D.C.Metro.
It’s nice to go slow. Poetry is reserved for when he’s best able to focus. And Lindsey typically buys his books as opposed to taking them out from the library or borrowing them, since there’s no use in rushing through Toni Morrison’s oeuvre or “Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar, a novel that seemingly all of Lindsey’s friends finished before he could.
Reading often brings up childhood nostalgia for Lindsey. He once was able to shut out the world, put his head in a book and blindly follow his mom around. One of Lindsey’s favorite poets, Charles Simic, wrote about how reading evoked a similar state of possibility: “Angels and gods huddled/ In dark unopened books.”
Lindsey, like many young adults, has incorporated his love for literature into his love life. A partner who cares about reading is “one of those underlying things I look for,” Lindsey said. “It’s a sign sometimes of how someone’s intellect works and what they’re open to, how they see the world.”
There’s nothing new about perusing the bookshelf of a potential mate, placing a personal ad in the New York Review of Books or fantasizing about a rom-com situation where passion ignites at a bookstore. But a partner who regularly reads has renewed appeal, especially as attention spans dwindle and only 32 percent of Americans read five or more books in 2025, according to polling from YouGov. The pickings might seem slim: Just this week, influencer Alix Earle said that she hasn’t read a book since Dr. Seuss.
Bookstores have capitalized on the eros in the air with speed-dating and singles events. One new app is testing how language can help predict compatibility, following in the footsteps of specialized dating apps for anti-vaxxers, vegans and conservatives. (There’s plenty of fish, even in a smaller sea, it seems.) And since literary culture has acquired a pervasiveness via celebrity book clubs and BookTok recommendations, it doesn’t seem like the affair between reading and dating will slow down anytime soon.
Several adults in their 20s and 30s told The Washington Post in interviews that they’ve sought out romantic relationships with fellow bibliophiles for any number of reasons: A reader might have a curious streak or a strong grasp on how to communicate, while remaining amenable to different perspectives.
“Something about the active involvement of reading is very special, even challenging,” Lindsey said, “because it requires a certain level of patience and openness.”
Readme, which launched in early September, is a dating app that hopes to pair bookworms through a 25-question quiz that accounts for taste, styles of communication and more. The app, which was dreamed up by Co-Star founder Banu Guler and creative consultant Emily Segal, doesn’t just ask for your favorite books. Users are organized into 12 archetypes — such as the Universal Valentine and Former Gifted Kid — before being matched with other readaholics.
“We wanted to avoid a situation where you were performatively curating a bunch of books and using that to signal who you are,” Segal said. No need for thirst traps with “All About Love” or profile photos with “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” in the background.
Segal said a “good number” of dates have happened already because of Readme, while several readers who The Post spoke with expressed curiosity about the app. (She declined to share the number of active users.) Russ Marshalek, 44, set up a Readme account a few weeks ago and has already spoken with several people about “Exit Party,” Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel that takes place after the collapse of the United States.
“It gives you a starting point: Being on this app, you automatically know that if you match with somebody, you can start talking,” Marshalek said, noting that it’s a relief compared with standard dating apps. “It makes it a lot more fun. The other apps can kind of be sort of terrifying.”
The transactional culture of those apps is what that Segal and Guler wanted to avoid with Readme. But being seen as a reader on Hinge or Bumble “gives you some street cred,” said Nidhi Mandadi, a 27-year-old supply chain analyst who lives in Washington. “You come off a little bit smarter.”
A fan of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet who typically reads upward of 20 books a year, Mandadi went through a phase where she only wanted to date voracious readers. “It meant that they were offline,” Mandadi said. “That’s very important because I don’t want someone that’s plugged into their phone all the time.”
Finding romance with someone who’s unplugged is one of the primary reasons book lovers search for other book lovers. It’s also why Nat Esten, 40, believes that singles events at Book Club Bar, a small chain of shops in New York that he co-owns, have been so successful.
“So many of us are trying to push back against the constant serotonin reward of just scrolling and watching videos and constantly being entertained and living in a passive state of always consuming media,” Esten said.
He’s somewhat of an expert at offline connection: In 2011, Esten met his wife Erin in a book club where they fought over Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” Fast-forward to 2019, and the couple opened Book Club Bar together.
Several individuals said that dating events at bookstores seemed to help ease anxiety around approaching strangers. Zach Yang, a 38-year-old who worked as a software engineer at Microsoft, wanted to figure out how to get polite, quiet individuals to talk with each other at events. So, he founded Asaya, an app that plans mix-and-mingles at bookstores and uses profiles made in advance to match attendees.
“I’ve definitely been to other things where it feels like you’re at some middle school dance,” said Yang. “This feels more like, ‘We are coming to somewhere where we already have some common ground.’”
Ralph Tedeschi, who owns Turn the Page Bookshop in Williamsburg, Virginia, said that a couple dropped by the store to tell him they’d met at a speed-dating event there. Now, they’re planning on getting married, which Tedeschi thought would be great publicity for the store’s events: “See, our speed dating works.”
The fuss around dating readers isn’t just at evenings planned exclusively for singles. Lost City Books, a fixture of Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, doesn’t offer speed-dating events. But it’s clear to Jonny Teklit, the shop’s 28-year-old events director, that romances have bloomed between the bookshelves. “So many first dates happen at the bookstore,” he said.
Teklit added that he’s seen people buy a stack of books for their dates and bond over shared favorite authors. The Lost City staff has even kicked around the idea of a missed connections board.
“Reading widely exposes you to the breadth of human emotion, human experience,” Teklit said. “It allows you to build connections, understand others, understand yourself.” All of which is helpful, he believes, in building a lasting relationship.
Sabrina Moorer, a 25-year-old who works at Washington’s East City Bookshop and studies library science, hesitates when asked if she would date someone who doesn’t read. It’s not a nonnegotiable. But for Moorer, a future partner would have to provide a level of romance straight from a novel.
“I’ve read happily ever afters,” Moorer said. In books, “I have seen true love, and I won’t accept anything less now.”
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