Life/Dating

I Didn’t Know The Man I Was Dating Couldn’t Read

I was dumbfounded.

According to The Literacy Project, The average American reads at a 7th- to 8th-grade level. 4% of Americans (global literacy rate: 3%) have Below Level 1 literacy. That means they are nonliterate. They can’t read well enough to perform activities of daily living in modern society — let alone take a literacy test.

I once dated a 34-year-old man who could not read a single word — yet I didn’t even know it. We were seeing one another for quite some time before I discovered his rather impressively well-kept secret.

It all came out in the wash when we went to a restaurant to eat and I asked him why we had always come to this particular restaurant every single time we ate out.

Even though he was holding the menu in front of him he looked up at me and said, exasperatedly, “Because I don’t know how to read and I know what I like here. I always order the same thing because I can’t read this stupid menu!”

He slapped the menu on the table in an apparent signal of defeat. The jig was up. The truth was out.

I was dumbfounded.

I assumed he was holding the menu all this time to pretend he could comprehend the words he was looking at…?

I was curious to know more but he didn’t want to discuss the issue further.

As a fairly well-educated daughter of British parents who delighted in proper grammar, experiencing someone who could not read was completely foreign to me. Not only that — but for someone to be in their mid-30s and still not have learned how to read was truly astonishing to me.

I continued seeing him, but the illiteracy issue wasn’t the only problem. He had many other emotional and mental issues and the relationship did not last longer than several months.

What really struck me was how this man was able to survive all that time in the world without ever knowing how to read.

He kept his world very small and very familiar. He stayed in the same area of town, went to the same shops to buy things, and went to the same restaurants — especially when he took a new woman out on a date. He never left his tiny little corner of the world — his comfort zone.

It took until that moment at the restaurant for me to even know that this man I was seeing couldn’t read and I had been seeing him for a couple of months.

Looking back, it’s quite sad that this man never took it upon himself to learn how to read, instead, he simply stayed in the same place. It seemed to me as though there was a whole world he was missing out on if he could just try to learn or ask somebody to teach him. But he had no interest in that. He was happy living his life the way it was, staying in a small community, and traveling within the same circles.

I can’t imagine what kind of childhood my short-lived boyfriend must have had to never learn how to read but I do know he was embarrassed by it because he didn’t like the subject to be brought up at all. If we could have discussed it further I would have asked more questions but the relationship was over pretty quickly.

I still wonder if this man ever did start learning to read.

Imagine going out on a date in your 30s and not being able to read the menu?

It’s hard for me to imagine, but apparently, millions of Americans deal with this challenge daily.

According to Dr. Iris Feinberg, associate director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University, anyone can have low literacy skills.

“It’s not just people who are poor. It’s not just people who are racial minorities. It’s not just people who speak funny because they’re from the South. It literally can be anybody,” she said.

This entire experience reminded me of just one more thing I possess that can easily be taken for granted.

You can show your love for my writing by leaving me a tip of your choosing at my PayPal, or by contributing on my Ko-fi page! Thank you!

Want more juicy reads from me? Keep scrolling…

I also have a podcast about being a stepmom. Check it out if you’re interested.