During six years of singlehood in my 20s, I became a person I did not know. Before, I had always been a reader. I walked to the library several times a week as a kid and stayed up late into the night reading under my blankets with a flashlight. I checked out so many books and returned them so quickly the librarian once snapped, “Don’t take home so many books if you’re not going to read them all.”

“But I did read them all,” I said, unloading them into her arms.

I was an English major in college and went on to get a master’s in literature. But shortly after the spiral-bound thesis took its place on my shelf next to the degree, I stopped reading. It happened gradually, the way one heals or dies.

When I created my OkCupid profile (screen name: missbibliophile52598), I filled out the “favorite books” section, letting my taste in literature speak for me: “100 Years of Solitude,” “A Moveable Feast,” “White Teeth,” “The Namesake,” “The Known World,” “The God of Small Things,” “How to Read the Air.” But a twinge of panic surged through me when I realized it had been more than two years since I had read most of those titles, and more than five years for some.