A few months in, I already liked the person who would become my husband quite a lot, but I properly fell for him on learning that we’d both loved reading Douglas Hill’s books as children. The Blade of the Poisoner. Master of Fiends. The Last Legionary books.
So I read with no surprise at all of startup dating app MyBae’s finding that users who include reading tags on their profiles were more likely to find a match. “Out of all our matches, 21% had related reading tags in common. This is much stronger than the average of 15% for all other matches that similar matches with music, films, or TV,” says MyBae, adding that “users spent longer in general” on the profiles of people with reading tags.
“Users that featured book-specific tags such as #TheGirlOnTheTrain, #GameOfThronesBooks or #TheLastMan and used at least two book-related tags had a dramatically increased chance of matching with someone,” writes MyBae’s Daniel Sobey-Harker. I was initially intrigued about the unexpected number of people enjoying Mary Shelley’s lesser-known novel, before I realised he must mean Brian K Vaughan’s comic series.
Sobey-Harker speculates that the reason for readers’ popularity on the app “could be either that people who listed their interests to a detailed degree took more care with their profile … or that reading books physically changes you into a sexier version of yourself. I’ll be going with the latter.”
I’m not sure about the sexy transformation, but I do know that whether it’s with a friend or a partner, there’s little better than discovering a shared love of an author, particularly an obscure one. (The last time I looked, Hill’s books were heinously out of print, but I see Gollancz has brought them back through SF Gateway: hurrah, and weekend sorted.)
My husband and I are busier these days, and I’ve never really been able to tempt him down some of my reading paths – romance and thrillers are not his thing, or not yet, at least. But we’ve recently overlapped on Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy and on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam books. I write about books for a living, but there’s still no one I’d rather discuss them with than him.
