You Should Date Someone Boring

You should date someone boring. A piece of advice that Charles Bukowski would have voted against I believe. A man who wrote the girl on the escalator would have probably disagreed with me on this one, said the boring must only attract the boring. The ones who think they own the world when they’re with someone while they’re in fact just having another copy of a human beside them.

However, for some reasons I have my motives to tell you this. I hope you date someone boring. 

A friend once told me that when one person falls in love, it’s usually the exotic things that attract them to someone. The unapologetic laugh, the crazy hobbies, the brave opinions. It’s usually how one person could stand in a crowd and really have everyone’s eyes or how their existence alone can mean something to people or how much they could cause a change in others without planning to; just because who they are will force people to be different sometimes.

A friend once told me that as you grow older you realize that this doesn’t happen much. That a unique person that could really pull on your heart isn’t someone you see every day, and it takes such a wild person to leave such a mark on you. Otherwise, you only meet the same kind of people. The mediocre and the ordinary who do the same things every day, who make safe choices and barely have big dreams and who usually don’t plan to change that anytime soon.

And this sounds right sometimes. Why would a girl whom you always see sitting at a corner, reading a book or drinking her coffee in silence attract you? How could a guy who wears old ties and says he can’t wait to have kids and wakes up at six a.m every day to get to work on time seem to have anything interesting? How would the person who is always speaking of trends and changes his personality according to whom he is talking to make your heart skip a beat?

My friend sounds right when he tells me that the boring people are those who have nothing to share, no soul, no passion. When he describes the boring as people who are safe and who would take no risks in life.

And in fact, this is true. To an extent, when someone fears doing everything and is always counting his next steps and doesn’t know how to live in the moment not only would this sound boring. It’d sound uninteresting, repulsive even.

But look at how I see it.

I remember this quiet neighbor we had who always woke up early, sat on her balcony and spoke to no one. I remember how plain and silly she used to look and I remember that after a while of not showing up at that balcony and coming back one day to sit there as pale as never before we discovered she had had cancer for two years. The silly boring neighbor turned out a stronger fighter than anyone I’ve ever known.

I remember that boy at school who looked too polite it’s rather creepy than attractive. I remember how when someone used to fall or cry or even just look sad, someone he doesn’t even know that much, I remember he’d be the first to run to them and see if there’s any help he could offer them. I remember how that boring little kid turned out with the biggest heart of us all.

Look at how I see it.

Do you know what love does to people? Do you have any idea about the magic that love can make? Do you understand what it means to get into someone’s world and discover little things about it and find yourself turning it and them upside down and they will not even lament because love, healthy love changes us unwillingly into all the beautiful things we never even knew we wished to become. It shows us other worlds, opens windows to places we have always longed for but never actually seen.

You see, I hope you date someone boring because with love they’re not going to seem as boring as you may think of them. Because when you date someone and choose to let yourself in their world you’ll see how much you are capable of love. True love that doesn’t label people as boring before it could dive into them to know who they really are.

Because you’ll be surprised at how much passion and soul someone you once thought of as boring can turn out to have and because you never really know a person until you really know them.

I hope you date someone boring because I hope you teach your eyes to see the beauty beyond one’s looks. 

I hope you grow a belief in your heart that pretty much everyone can be loved.That pretty much everyone you meet has something beautiful about him. And it has nothing to do with his body or his face, but it has a lot to do with his soul and mind.

I hope you learn how to love someone for how he jumps randomly from one topic to another that it’s almost impossible to get bored around him. 

I hope you learn how to love someone for how he uses please a lot while talking or how he says thank you for a little too much to anyone for anything.

I hope you learn how to love someone for how he can’t keep his eyes on you for too long without shying away to look on the ground or something or how he shakes his leg a lot if nervous. 

I hope you learn how to love someone for how he talks about his favorite band or book or movie even though you share none of his interests.

I hope you learn how to love someone for the way he likes to drink his tea or for the way he pulls an effort to show off something he has done. 

I hope you learn how to love someone for how he loves himself a lot or how he can unapologetically walk away from a group of people just because he doesn’t like their company, how he usually puts himself first.

I hope you learn how to love someone for how he throws great jokes when you least expect it or for how he will encourage others to be better because he says he can tell from people’s eyes when they need help. 

I hope you learn how to love someone who doesn’t light the room with his smile, whose eyes won’t be the ones to attract you among a crowd, who can even be hardly noticed even when he is alone and who is not remarkably brave at anything.

I hope you learn how to love someone who thinks he’s ordinary and find out…

How there’s nothing ordinary about him.

That you learned how to love him for the odds and the small things and the little gestures and that these things, as separate and random as they seem, gracefully and beautifully make him who he is maybe even more than who you thought he was when you regarded him as a whole.

And it is true.

They may not talk to you about how they climbed Mount Everest or saved a bunch of people from a fire, but if you love someone for his details, his small tiny details, you will see how there’s absolutely nothing boring about that and how much you’ll grow in this process yourself.