Why Readers Make Great Partners: What the Science Says

Is a person who reads a better partner? Science cannot promise that, but it does point to something real. People who have read a lot of fiction over their lifetime tend to score a little higher on tests of "theory of mind", the ability to work out what other people think and feel. Habitual readers also build larger vocabularies and broader general knowledge. Those are useful qualities in a relationship: understanding, curiosity and the words to talk things through. What the research does not show is that one novel turns anyone into a kinder person, or that non-readers make worse partners.

The idea that readers are the best people to fall in love with went viral through an Elite Daily essay by Lauren Martin. Below is a closer look at the studies behind that claim, what has held up since, and how a love of books really can shape the way two people connect.

What "deep reading" is

Anyone who has finished a long novel knows the feeling: you close the cover and sit for a moment, half still in another world, a little changed. In a 2013 piece for TIME, writer Annie Murphy Paul called this slow, absorbed kind of attention "deep reading" and worried it was being crowded out by skimming and scrolling.

Deep reading is different from scanning a headline. You hold a character's motives in mind across hundreds of pages, notice contradictions, guess at what they are hiding and adjust when you are wrong. That mental exercise is close to what we do with real people every day, which is why psychologists became interested in whether fiction trains it.

What the research on fiction and empathy found

Much of this work comes from psychologist Raymond Mar, now at York University in Toronto, and cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley of the University of Toronto. In a 2006 study nicknamed "Bookworms versus nerds", they measured how much fiction and non-fiction adults had read over their lives, using a test that asks people to recognise authors' names. Heavier fiction readers did better on tasks that involve reading emotions and social cues. A 2009 follow-up found the link remained after accounting for personality traits that might explain it.

Mar's team then looked at young children. A 2010 study of preschoolers found that those who were exposed to more storybooks tended to show stronger theory-of-mind development. Again, this was a correlation: families who read often may differ in many other ways too.

In 2013 the journal Science published a striking experiment by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research. They reported that reading a short passage of literary fiction, rather than popular fiction or non-fiction, briefly improved people's ability to read emotions in photographs of eyes. Kidd's explanation was that literary authors leave characters incomplete, so readers must do the work of filling in their minds.

What held up, and what did not

Science moves on, and this is where many viral articles stop too early. In 2016 three independent labs, led by Maria Eugenia Panero of Boston College, repeated the Kidd and Castano experiment with the same passages and nearly 800 participants. The quick boost from a single reading did not appear. The British Psychological Society's Research Digest reported the result under a blunt headline about the failed replication.

Yet the same replication confirmed the older finding: people with more lifetime exposure to fiction still scored better on the emotion-reading test. A summary on Mar's own research blog, OnFiction, put the lesson plainly. A single brush with a novel probably does not change you overnight, but long-term reading habits are linked with social understanding.

So the fair version of the headline is this. Readers, on average, may be somewhat better at understanding other minds. Whether reading causes that, or whether empathetic people are simply drawn to stories, is still debated.

Vocabulary, knowledge and better conversations

A second strand of evidence is about language. In a 1998 article for American Educator titled "What Reading Does for the Mind", education researchers Anne E. Cunningham of the University of California, Berkeley, and Keith Stanovich showed that the amount people read predicts vocabulary, spelling and general knowledge, even after allowing for general ability. They argued that "the bulk of vocabulary growth during a child's lifetime occurs indirectly through language exposure rather than through direct teaching."

Books are full of words that rarely appear in everyday speech. Regular readers meet them over and over, in context, and absorb them. In a relationship, that can mean a partner who finds the right word for a hard feeling, who enjoys a long conversation about an idea, and who can disagree with you without the discussion collapsing into a fight. Being clever is not the attraction; being thoughtful, and able to put thoughts into words, is.

Myths worth dropping

• "Readers are scientifically proven to be nicer people." No study shows that. The data show modest average differences on specific tests, not character.
• "Reading is dying." Habits have changed and many people read on screens or listen to audiobooks, but book reading has not disappeared. Whether audiobooks offer the same benefits is still an open question.
• "If your ex didn't read, that explains the breakup." Plenty of kind, perceptive people rarely open a novel, and some avid readers are poor partners. Use reading as one clue about curiosity and openness, never as a test.
• "Only literary fiction counts." The lifetime-exposure studies measure fiction broadly. Genre readers spend just as much time inside other people's heads.

How books can bring two people closer

If you love reading, or love someone who does, a few habits can turn it into shared ground rather than a solitary hobby:

• Swap favourites. Giving someone the book that shaped you is a quiet way of saying who you are.
• Read the same book at the same time. A two-person book club gives you something new to talk about besides work and chores.
• Read aloud. It slows you both down and is a surprisingly intimate way to spend an evening.
• Ask about characters, not just plots. "Why do you think she did that?" opens the same perspective-taking muscles the research is interested in.
• Respect different tastes. Empathy includes accepting that your partner loves thrillers while you prefer poetry.

Martin's essay ended with the idea that dating a reader means sharing in a thousand lives. The research suggests a gentler version: people who spend years imagining other lives may get a little better at understanding the real one in front of them. That is worth looking for, whether or not there is a book in their bag.

Sources: Original essay by Lauren Martin, Elite Daily (via Idealist Revolution); BPS Research Digest on the Panero et al. (2016) replication; OnFiction: A single brush with fiction does not…; Mar et al. (2006), Mar & Oatley et al. (2009), Mar et al. (2010) and Kidd & Castano (2013) as linked in the text; Cunningham & Stanovich, "What Reading Does for the Mind", American Educator (1998).

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