What you need to know before dating an English student

With summer well on its way everyone’s getting prepared for those irritating couple pictures, “Barca with Bae” and “Amazing day with this one” will become frequent features on your Snapchat stories.

Although your group holiday to Ibiza is going to be absolutely mental, don’t deny that you’re slightly dreading the rest of the four months that will be spent idly sitting at home scrolling through your Instagram feed, looking at all those sickening couple pics of day trips to Thorpe Park or weekend breaks to Prague. Well you know what they say: if you can’t beat them, join them.

Care free couples at their worst

If you’re looking for someone to spend your summer with, an English student with their abundance of culture could be a very good choice, but there are a few things you should know first.

We can be very needy

With 9 contact hours a week and most of our work load consisting of reading fiction we have A LOT of free time on our hands. Be prepared for frequent text bombardments requesting a playmate. Saying this, don’t even think about labelling our degree as pointless or easy. We’d like to see someone else try and finish three books a week and determine the many depths of the works of Shakespeare, but when we’re done being a genius your presence will be required.

Prepare to be romantic

The average English student has tackled all the romantic poets, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats, which perhaps creates an unrealistic perception of romance. Added to this most of us are obsessed with fairy tales, you may sometimes have to act like Prince Charming.

Stay away around deadline day 

It comes with the nature of our degree, for five weeks out of six in a semester we’re care free, sociable and fun…but then comes deadline week. Suddenly we need to hand in three 3000 word essays and the weeks of partying and sleeping seem like a long ago fantasy. Our stress levels will be at 1000 during this week so try and stay clear unless you have coffee. Coffee will always be appreciated.

Get your grammar in shape

It’s finally time to learn the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’ and ‘are’ and ‘our’. Homophones are important to us and they should be important to you too. The same thing goes for grammar: we all know a comma is the difference between ‘helping your uncle jack off a horse’ or ‘helping your Uncle, Jack, off a horse’. You’ll save yourself a lot of earache if you get up to scratch.

You’ll never get to choose the film

It’ll go one of two ways with this one, either a stubborn refusal to watch the film you’ve picked because we’ve read the book and its obviously far superior to anything that Fox can come up with. P.S. I Love You and One Day are prime examples of this being a correct theory.

Or we’ll demand that you watch a mostly boring and inaccurate adaptation of the book we were supposed to read this week for our seminar but didn’t quite get round to.

We over analyse everything!

Be warned everything you do from the colour of your T-shirt to the way you text us will be analysed. For example, If you decide to take the English Student home to meet your family and your Mum happens to be wearing black, for her its just a black top but for us it’s a representation of her repressed mourning and dark hatred of us… (maybe a bit intense but possible).

Book Shops are fun

Our ideas for day trips aren’t always the most exciting for those who aren’t that into reading. You may be requested to take us on dates to little boutique second hand bookshops, where you’re expected to pretend you’re interested at a load of dusty books. On the plus side these trips are normally followed by cake or wine!

Life crises are commonplace

Late night tears and long conversations about the prospects of our future are a little bit more frequent then I would like to admit. Be prepared to listen to all the woes and worries of life after university with a humanities degree, it tends to look particularly bleak after midnight.

Lastly, never complain about your reading load to and English student, we always have more. ALWAYS.