Rick Morton Thursday 23 February 2012 12:40pm

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Rick Morton

BY RICK MORTON

“We need to make books sexy again. If you go home with someone and they don’t have books, don’t f*ck them.”

Oh, John Waters! You vicious, moustachioed man! What a perfect plot. Man the ramparts, set your phasers to no freaking way. Don’t have sex with anybody who isn’t turned on by knowledge or the very many ways to get it. Make this your creed. Put it on a T-shirt. And then don’t take that T-shirt off for anyone who violates your very impressive, lovely standards.

A close friend of mine was once at a man’s house doing her best impression of a yoga instructor in his bed. But her mind was elsewhere. He had books – hold me! – but she needed to make sure her own collection wasn’t in an abominable state of insignificance. She scanned the titles he had on display and then promptly went about purchasing most of them.

A few weeks later, at her house, he was very impressed to find they were on a similar wavelength. It took years to divulge her little bout of intellectual dishonesty which, in his eyes, was the equivalent of doing a little striptease of the mind. It was hot. Downright scintillating that she’d cared so much about a matter of the head and not, say, putting fake tan on her pasty white skin.

If you were to ask me what I find attractive in someone – not just potential partners – I could rattle off the usual suspects (oh doesn’t she have lovely eyes) or dig my heels in to find something a little more unique (I love the way his eyebrows point ever so slightly up in the centre of his face) but that would be disingenuous.

Curiosity is sexy. It makes me go weak at the knees. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it invented the sex kitten.

Now, all this might sound despairingly lascivious. That’s probably because it is. But I’m not going wobbly at the thought of a boob or an impossibly small waist or, heaven forbid, a foot. That’s depressing. No, I’m talking about falling in love with someone’s mind.

This isn’t about people who are smart already. Leave them to their Tolstoy and obscure works of fiction by Micronesian revolutionaries. This is about the pursuit of knowledge and information and anyone big enough to admit they’re very small indeed. Of mind, people. Of mind.

This goes for all things. I subscribe to the tell me more school of thought. Even if you’re talking about bandicoots, I’m liable to ask for more information. What’s the worst that could happen? (Update: I could find out about catheters. But lo, no adventure was ever risk free). No one ever achieved anything by resting on their laurels. Indeed, many laurels have been harmed this way.

Ask questions, read widely, grow sexy. And castigate the living insides out of any self-important bore who thinks there is such a thing as a stupid question and wants to make the world feel dumb for asking them so.

You can never be ‘dumb’ if you ask anything. But you can be if you pretend you don’t need to know.

How important is someone’s mind if you’re dating, or looking to date? What about in every day life?