I am married to reading, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.

My long and tumultuous relationship with reading began many years ago, when I fell in love at first sight. My mom tells me that when I was about 4 or 5 years old, I would carry around a backpack full of books, even though I couldn’t even read yet. I would sit by myself, flirting with reading, pretending that I knew what the strange, mystical shapes and letters meant. I was young, immature, and hopelessly infatuated with reading, who was older and mysterious. I wanted what I knew I wasn’t ready for, but the restrictions meant nothing to me. And so, I persisted in trying to read. I constantly flipped through books, reciting random - even self-created - words, confident that I could teach myself. Looking back, I’m surprised that my parents were not worried by the fact that their 4 year old daughter talked to herself, muttering nonsensical words and incantations.

I eventually grew older and learned of letters and words and sentences. I had finally cracked reading’s secret code and the wonders of reading were beyond my wildest imaginations. This is when I really fell in love with reading and we began openly dating. I can remember the great excitement and exhilaration reading gave me, those feelings of joy and wonder that have since faded. I devoured books by the dozen, spending hours just reading book after book. My favorite childhood memories are centered around my afternoons with the Babysitters’ Club, the Sweet Valley twins, Nancy Drew, and Miss Piggle Wiggle. I had almost an obsession with reading anything and everything that I could get my hands on, at all times of the day; I just couldn’t seem to get enough. I read in the car. I read at the dinner table (a habit that my parents tried desperately to combat until they learned that it was useless). I read in the bathroom and I would even stay up past my bedtime to read, as though I didn’t read enough during the day. I read the backs of cereal boxes, shampoo bottles, and instruction manuals. Posters. Signs. Advertisements. The list goes on and on and on. I was not selective with my reading preferences and being still young and naive, I blindly read and loved everything.

However, as I grew and began to evolve as a person, my relationship with reading began to evolve as well. My involvement in reading matured, as did my selectiveness and preference. I began to read more slowly and meaningfully, instead of inhaling books just for the sake of reading. I realized what my preferences were and what genre of books I enjoyed the most and I learned of the emotional attachment that reading could bring. For instance when I first discovered the magical world of Harry Potter, I was utterly convinced that I was best friends with Harry, Ron, and Hermione; I believed that I would one day receive a letter inviting me to go to school at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. These were probably the happiest and most carefree days of my relationship. I loved to read, I loved what I was reading about, I had all the time in the world to read. I look back upon these days with fondness because they unfortunately did not last forever. As with most relationships, I started to have much conflict with reading.

As my workload at school increased, I found that I had less time for individual reading and I shockingly realized that, with the time I did have for myself, I had other things that I would rather do than read. Watching TV, hanging out with my friends, and going on the computer all competed with reading for my love and attention. Not only had I found other ways to spend my limited time, but I also found that I subconsciously struggled with transitioning into difficult and advanced reading. Reading was something that had always come easily to me, something that was second nature. But I found that I now had to read things that I wouldn’t always understand right away and I had to dive deeper into the texts to analyze and discover hidden meanings and messages.

I realized that reading no longer brought me the same wide-eyed joy and amazement that it once did. This led to a sort of loss of self-identity and almost a break-up of my relationship with reading. I only read when I had to and I hardly read on my own time anymore. It was like someone had pressed the brakes on my relationship and everything came skidding to a stop. I tried to reassure myself with the idea that I still was infatuated with reading, but every time I picked up a book, it startled me to find that I no longer felt that bubbling excitement. My previously deep, limitless, and crazy craving for reading - that had been so wide it could have challenged the great seas of the world - now seemed to barely be the size of a plastic cereal bowl.

However, this lull in my relationship, fortunately, did not last forever. My great reawakening occurred when I entered the jungle called high school. I had thought that I knew everything there was to know about reading and that I had figured out all of reading’s secrets. But I soon realized that I had been foolishly clutching on to the past. I had been bemoaning the fact that I was no longer excited by the hackneyed charms of reading and had been meanwhile oblivious to the wide, undiscovered world of reading that was out there waiting for me. Reading once again opened my eyes to new emotions, thoughts, revelations, and truths. I read books that shocked me, that made me angry, that made me sad, and that taught me things about my own life. I fell in love all over again.

I have come to learn that although the joy of reading surely is not the same joy I had experienced when I was younger, reading still gives me a different kind of joy; a more experienced and quiet joy. The joy of knowing that reading would surely never leave me. I realized that reading was something that I could not live without, an eternal part of me, an immortal spouse.