Your library crush is normal and so are your fantasies

We all have them. Your love requires no audible communication, and a simple look is enough to push you over the edge.

Library boyfriends and girlfriends are a requirement for most when cramming for the exam you should have prepared for months ago. When you sit down, having battled freshers to find a table, no matter your surroundings you’ll instantly find a crush. Without question, you will fancy about 80% of those around you. Something about people dressed in casual winter gear, bored out of their minds, while simultaneously showing no interest in you is enough to get hearts jumping.

When fancying girls, the fantasy is simple. After we graduate we both take jobs in the City. She likes to work, so when the children come along a live-in nanny is hired to stay in the house in the Surrey Hills. We have a happy family life but also like taking regular trips without the kids, because we deserve the break. We may fight occasionally, sometimes we may sleep in different beds. But inevitably we will always make up and come together, if not for the kids, then to at least run from the fear of dying alone.

You know, the regular fantasy stuff.No one is sure what makes the library such a  place of romantic fantasy. Maybe it’s just another excuse not to finish your essay. Or, maybe you’re just incredibly lonely and want someone to hold you. The truth isn’t clear.

It’s not like you do it in a lecture. You don’t work out who will be Fictional Wife #78 and where you’ll go for Christmas. Is it the Cotswolds again, or her parents down South?

Even when you make a proper connection with someone – split second eye contact doesn’t count – it is rare to obsess. Except in the library. Only in the library do you start thinking about whether Italy is a suitable honeymoon destination for you, and Susie.The reason for finding literally everyone in the library hot is probably simple. When the grandkids are sitting at your feet, asking how you and your wife met, the idea it started in a library has a Hugh Grant Rom-Com feeling to it. It’s a meet cute. It has all of the trappings of the best and worst rom-coms, and you love it.

That, and the idea that explaining to anyone the concept of Klute in your later years makes you shudder.