17 Things To Expect When You Love Someone Who’s Dyslexic

1. At first, you’ll swoon over your dyslexic boyfriend or girlfriend’s tendency to call you so often, blissfully unaware that this habit is an offshoot of their strong preference for speaking over typing out a text message. (You might even brag to friends that you’re dating someone who really cares.)

2. When you notice that the person you’re dating leans heavily on voice powered search, it’ll hit you that the phone calls are actually simpler for them. This will make you smile.

3. Gradually, you will own your role as a walking dictionary, feeling wonderfully useful every time you’re asked to spell a tricky word.

4. The first time you’re asked to review an important email for spelling errors seems like a noteworthy occasion. You’re officially in the circle of trust.

5. If you were ever a grammar snob, you will quickly grow out of your tendency to judge people for spelling and syntactical errors.

6. You will feel better about yourself once you sincerely appreciate the reality that spelling poorly isn’t a sign of subpar intellect.

7. You will learn to rely on specific landmarks when providing directions (e.g. at the intersection, drive towards the McDonald’s, not the car wash) instead of using the words “right,” “left,” “east,” “west,” “north,” or “south.”

8. You won’t bother pointing out when your partner accidentally swaps two words in a sentence because it doesn’t matter. You totally understand what they meant.

9. You will start to appreciate educational television programming more than ever because your significant other regularly tunes into History, National Geographic, and The Discovery Channel, great sources of learning through seeing and hearing as opposed to reading.

10. You’ll start keeping a list of all the great documentaries you plan to watch together for the same reason.

11. When your dyslexic boyfriend or girlfriend suggests that you start reading a book to them out loud, you’ll be moved, and you’ll take the job of selecting a title seriously. There’s nothing quite like sharing a book with another human word by word, you’ll soon realize.

12. You will come to understand how rare it is to find such a committed listener—someone sincerely invested in remembering everything they hear because jotting down notes was never the best option for them.

13. Whenever you catch yourself inverting a phrase (e.g. I put the counter on the keys), you’ll wonder if the dyslexia is rubbing off on you somehow.

14. If it is, you won’t really mind, because you can see the wonderful advantages of your significant other’s so-called disadvantage.

15. For instance, you’re very aware that your dyslexic partner’s creativity was honed through carving out unique methods of learning by necessity.

16. You know that their resolve is rooted in the fact that they’ve been forced to deal with people and/or a school system that didn’t really understand their brain all that well because navigating such barriers requires a lot of determination.

17. You also know that they’re beautifully humble because they were made to feel dumb at some point in school, where kids are often primarily judged by how well they can read and write. It may have taken your partner a bit longer to master the whole literacy thing, but that doesn’t mean they lagged behind in grasping complex concepts.

18. By the time you reach the point of relationship seriousness that demands imagining your hypothetical children, you won’t care whether or not they inherit dyslexia because you fully respect the upside to this learning “disability.”