Find someone who eats bruschetta: That’s ‘broo-SKET-uh,’ not ‘brushetter,’ a slender piece of ciabatta toasted and brushed with garlic and oil and covered in fresh tomato and basil– the chunks inevitably fall off the bread and the olive oil runs over your lips and down your chin. 

The whole thing is delicious, deeply physical and delightfully undignified, and someone who can eat a real bruschetta is someone you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it’s messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never gonna happen. For that, you need someone who isn’t afraid of a faceful of olive oil.

Find someone who has books: And not just a dozen or two, but books by the kg, dragged home in bulging plastic bags from a faraway church sale. Because someone who can see the glory in this – in getting your knees dirty scraping through crates for a withered spine and a hint of plot – that’s someone who understands that a bad day stands zero chance against a good story, that’s someone you want to lock down asap, because if you’re going to spend a life with someone, it better be someone who can tell that life well, someone with dirty knees.

Find someone who laughs: And I mean LAUGHS, in all caps, as in HAHA, not hehe. Find someone who guffaws, who bellows, who at the slightest hint of humour sounds like a hyena choking on a kazoo. Don’t go for someone who’ll let slip an austere chuckle every once in a while. Find someone who loses it on the regular, loses it so spectacularly that they have to sprint for the loo. Find someone who doesn’t quite make it. Find someone who laughs so hard that the joke is soon forgotten because the laugh is funnier anyway. 

That’s marriage material, right there. And you can’t have all that with a hehe. For that, you need a HAHA.”

“Bruschetta” – Nick Harkaway