[Edit, 4/1/2011] The context of this essay appears after the jump. I’ve learned not to be so prissy about things after all, although I still believe that at the end of the day, people will remember only the original version after all is said and done—everything else is basically a “tribute.” Consider me your humble servant.
Date a girl who eats
Date a girl who eats. Date a girl who dares to order a steak instead of slowly picking at salad leaves dressed with vinaigrette on the first date. She is the girl who knows what’s good on the menu, and knows that carbonara is often ordered by the bland brigade of people who don’t know any better.
Take her to a steak restaurant; make sure that you order your steak medium rare and not well done, because she knows that only barbarians order well done. Steak, medium rare, is the best way to identify good meat from the mediocre. She skips the Hollandaise and tucks in, stopping only for a bite of potatoes in between. The girl who eats doesn’t beat around the bush: she knows that steaks that require sauce are insecure.
Date her because that’s the same way she likes guys: substantial, and real. You won’t need to impress her with fancy restaurants, because the girl who eats has been to roadside eateries that serve food that’s just as good—or even better—than stuffy establishments. Knock down a stick of barbecue and a good, cold beer with her (as long as you don’t ice it down to a watery mess).
When you’re with the girl who eats, you won’t have to worry if there’s a fried chicken grease spot on your shirt, or if there’s ketchup on your cheek. She’ll understand—she’s been there. Maybe as a joke she’ll smear cake icing on the tip of your nose and kiss it off.
Date a girl who eats because she’ll take care of you. She’ll feed you chicken soup when you’re sick, and bake cookies on lazy weekends. A girl who eats isn’t afraid of adventure, and is constantly in search of new things to try: fried milk, chocolate bacon, tequila-flavored ice cream.
The girl who eats will go all over the world in search of the perfect meal, but knows that often, the best things are the ones closest to home. She will keep coming back to the basics: a bowl of steaming rice topped with her mom’s beef stew, flavored with onions and pepper; her grandmother’s soup, the result of hours of stirring in the kitchen. Her dad’s grilled cheese sandwiches, done in five minutes, but no less impressive.
Maybe one day, while the two of you share a slice of cake, she’ll realize that you’ve occupied a permanent place in her heart in the same way the stews and soups from home have, and she won’t have to go around the world in search of the perfect meal. Because anything you make for her at that point is the perfect meal, even if you char the steak and forget to salt the potatoes.
* * *
By now, everyone on the Internet has read the essay, You Should Date An Illiterate Girl by Charles Warnke. It’s known as the essay who made all the girls in the world feel like they were the ones being referred to in the essay, even if their staple reading fare is the Twilight series. After all, who wouldn’t want to be talked about in this way? “The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold… You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied.”
Let’s face it, most people read books a lot less than they like to think they do—blog entries don’t always count as substantial reading fare. But I’m not going to talk about the declining rate of literacy now. My problem is the inordinate number of “Date a girl who (fill in the blanks)” spinoff essays that came as a result of that first one. There’s Rosemarie Urquico’s Date A Girl Who Reads, which is one of the more popular ones. I’m not going to start listing the spinoffs because I don’t mean to pinpoint people, but all I’m saying is that there are a lot.
Imitation, they say, is the best form of flattery. It’s understandable that bloggers started imitating the writing style of the original essay, because it’s pretty damn flattering if you’re the target reader (or at the very least, part of the niche the writer had in mind). There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a great example of lazy writing—following a template, so to speak. The thing is, a lot of those spinoffs are actually well written. But aside from inserting analogies relevant to the fields they specialize in, there’s not much original thought that goes into those essays because they start, rise, and end in the same manner.
So today, when a friend tagged me in another of those spinoff essays, he jokingly said, “I dare the blogiverse; Date a Girl who EATS.” My reply? “Challenge accepted.” I did it to prove that doing one of those “date a girl who (fill in the blanks)” essays is basically like following a template. I’m not dismissing the bloggers who did them; I’m just saying that you guys could do better because anything done in that style, no matter how well written, is a ripoff. Why not do something original, something that’s all yours?
hi! I’m Rhio Angeline and I first read about your articles on the newspaper in the past years. Since then I’ve been a fan of your writings. Then I stumbled upon your blog a year ago and I am so happy that you finally get to update it. Anyways, I would like to reblog “Date a girl who eats”. I’ll be posting it on my blog: cheerhios.blogspot.com Thanks!
Hey Rhio! Wow, thank you so much for the nice words
yes, go ahead and re-blog. Thanks for visiting! Feel free to leave a note anytime.