The Rosie Project (Graeme Simsion)

In this quarantine, I finally had an idea to open a Goodreads account. Maybe it will motivate me to read more books. Although I had an account in the past which I never updated and didn't found quite interesting. The books I read I always forget. Because I never wrote any notes from the book I read or make any list. So when I try to remember the books I have read in the last 23 years I only can remember the Harry Potter series. Maybe it will be great to hold Goodreads accountable for my reading habits.

While scrolling, Goodreads suggested to me a novel named "The Rosie Project", which I later find out is recommended by Bill Gates. So it is potentially a good book to start my new journey of consciously reading books... 😑😑

Summary

The Rosie Project is an Australian novel by Graeme Simsion. It is published in the year 2013 (and I apparently never heard of it). It is a story of a man with autism spectrum disorder trying to find a wife for himself. Being socially awkward, it is tough for him to find someone to love him and stay with him. Due to that reason, he made a logical decision to start a project named " the wife project" that will help him find a perfect wife for him. He made detailed questionnaires and distributed those to various women as physical copies and also via the internet. Later he met a woman named Rosie, who is a PhD student in the psychology department, via his friend gene the director of the psychology department.

Thinking Rosie is a potential candidate for the wife project Don took her on a date and found out she is a totally unsuitable partner for Don. Despite this don found some disturbing past and promised to help her find her biological father which he later named as the father project via DNA testing.

As time passes don gets involved in the father project and unknowingly with Rosie. But due to some circumstances, don gets fired from his job and at the same time realises that he is in love with Rosie. Trying to change himself for Rosie to like him made Rosie reject him but don understand that he doesn't need to change himself. After all this, Don again proposed to Rosie and she accepted. They moved to new york city and got married. They also found out about the biological father of Rosie although Phil being the real father stayed with them.

My response

Me being myself and trying to make myself feel like intellectual I read a lot of analysis of the Rosie project and symbolism, metaphor, allegory, motifs, irony, imagery, neurodiversity, literary elements. If you want you to search them on google and I am sure you will find good stuff there... 😥😥

Here are some things I learned from The Rosie Project

1. The struggle is real. The whole thing of trying to find a perfect wife thing is actually legit. For people at this age, they don't have very many options. If somebody really wants to marry then they have two options i.e. arranged marriage (which is apparently still a thing in India) and love marriage (which is basically trial and error of finding "the one" by yourself). Due to some heavy age-old baggage of arrange marriage, people nowadays tend don't support it morally, so the only option left is to find a partner by yourself. Mate, just accept it, there is a very limited number of people we met every day let alone new people through our networks. So the only option is to maximise your networking and trying to meet new people. Dating apps are the only choice left. but finding a partner through a dating app is as we all know is tougher than seeing the god himself. Through don, the struggle can be seen for people to find the perfect one for themselves are real because they don't have the luxury to fall in love with whoever you meet at first so you need to see people and find out about them and carefully make a decision if you can spend your supposed lifetime with them.

2. The expectation of society for don is a real thing. People want you to be authentic. People want you to be the real you, only if you have a lot of emotion, only if you hate studying or working, only if you are trembling seriously in your love life. They don't want to see the authentic person who naturally isn't that emotional, who loves working and who actually is not very sad about life. If they came to us and tell this stuff to us directly on our face as being an authentic person themselves, then people are there to judge them and tell them to go to therapy as they are particularly screwed in the mental health section. I know taking care of your mental health is a big thing, but if somebody is fine and doesn't feel sad about the stuff most people are tearing up, then why we don't accept the truth of the person as being themselves, why do we always go and judge them.

3. You don't need to change yourself to be loved by someone else. When we love someone, there is a huge tendency for us to want to be like them or to be the person they want us to be. So we just want to change ourselves to be more worthy of the love of the partner. But I sometimes think, does it actually works? I mean if someone is exactly like me then I will feel like I am just with me, although movies make us feel that our love should be like that which makes us feel our partner as ourselves and no different than that. I think psychologically it will not work. if I would want to be with me, then I can stay at home by myself. When I am going out that means I am enjoying conversations with people who are somehow different from me, that makes us laugh, makes us being angry and enjoy sarcasm. This is the life we always enjoy. A partner being like you will make you bored to the hell. So stop trying to be predictable, stop trying to act as people expect you to act, do what you feel at the moment. These moments of surprises make memories, these unexpected things make memories, these help us live life by enjoying ourselves with friends, families and partners.

4. There is no age limit to being friends. here, in the east, we tend to be more based on kinship. We don't call people who are 1 year older than us by their name, we tend to call them a bro or stuff. This makes the use of the respect thing very much webbed into our friendships. The relationship of calling a friend as bro or sis, makes the spontaneity go away, it makes us think about how we want to speak to them, as them being the older one here, or for the younger ones, we should say this or that. Although this is not applicable for everybody, still this is a thing. One of the main important things this book teaches me s that age doesn't matter in friendship and the field of your work also doesn't matter.

5. It is good to try to find your partner on the internet or whatever way, but when love happens, it happens unconsciously. It is different from the perfect partner you dreamt of. It can be tough for you if you have someone totally different from you, but different viewpoints can make you see things differently. I am not saying you should have somebody who actually doesn't match your criteria, but I am saying be open to it. Be open to meet new people and don't judge them by their appearances and their qualification, you don't want to hire them in your company, you just want them to be with you, be your friends, your partner maybe, maybe some person who helped you in your life as a guide or mentor.

6. There are some old moral principles, which are there in the society about our relationships or friendship. Although they may not always be applicable in your situation, still, try to remember them. It will help you understand the expectations of other persons on you. What they want and what any relationship wants from you. Being in an open relationship is good, but try to remember being committed is what it means to be married. Trying to be in an open relationship as you don't have any expectations in return from your partner doesn't make your partner have no expectations from you. So try to follow what it is meant to be in any relationship.

7. Trying new things is fun. Trying new food, new area, new restaurant, new movie and new styles is always fun. Don't try to be rigid and only be in a specific way. Try new things every day, or every week or every month. Just don't limit yourself in a box. The only thing which is most important in this world is human connection. Human connection is the single most important thing you can do in your lifetime. So doing or trying new things can be scary at first as getting outside of your comfort zone is always tough but you need to do it anyway, but failure or insult is better than regret.

8. Never judge a book by its cover. Rosie projects give us the answer that never judges a person on their looks, or dressing sense or profession. try to look beyond that. because you sometimes can see very different things inside them which is not on the surface level. people dress up as they want, although sometimes you can find stuff about their personality by their appearance, most of the time, it doesn't show who they are and what they feel. Connection is the only way to learn about people and know what they are up for.

9. Parenthood is a very important topic in this book. sometimes our parents behave with us in a certain way and being children we derive a different meaning from it and stick with it. We never question the legitimacy of our feeling as a child, we blame them and judge them. We need to know the parents are going through a lot of stuff in their life too. we can help them out by not guessing stuff on behalf of them and speak to them freely. Parents also need to talk to their kids freely and discuss their feelings and problems and stuff. It makes the communication between the parent and kid very smooth and easy which doesn't lead to misunderstanding.

10. Being weird is good. Try to be weird. If you are weird in any sense then you are unique, you are special in your own way. It will make you appear to the people who are like you and you would have a very niche of a type of people that are within in the close community.

Criticism

It is being kinda cliche that the main characters of these novels are white man, with autism and with a huge level of intelligence and lack of emotions. seems too much like a traditionally masculine man, although I don't have any problem with them I think they are kinda repetitive.