Should your commitment to good writing rule your love life?

I admit it. I once questioned the suitability of a suitor because Pat Conroy was his favorite author. My Prince of Tides didn't stick around anyway. Hers did. From "Modern Love" in the NYTimes.  (A video version too. )

James and I stayed up all night, talking and kissing but making no promises. In the morning his parents drove us to Honolulu, where James flew to the Big Island, though he would soon be returning home to North Carolina. I caught a flight to New York, and I didn’t expect us to meet again. Just a wedding-night fling, I thought.Then the postcards began to arrive.

“I can’t stop thinking about you, Aloha!” James wrote, but the handwriting was scrawled and the spelling was terrible. He cares, I thought, but not enough to proofread. That may sound harsh, but to an aspiring writer, proofreading is the hallmark of caring. I cannot write an email or add a Facebook update without subjecting my words to tedious revision. If I send a story to a magazine with a missing period or uneven spacing, I feel as if I may as well have submitted a dirty pair of underwear.