The relationship between Winston and Julia is interesting.  While both people have a lot of things in common, such as their hatred of the Party, they have a lot of contrasting things that compliment them in a way that completes or make up of for what the other lacks.

One obvious difference is their age.  Despite their love(or lust) for each other, Julia is 26 years old as mentioned in page 132 of the book while Winston is 39 years old as mentioned in the first page.  This is a very large age difference between a couple.  For a young woman, Julia displays a lot of street smarts as she was able to pass a note of her love to him and she was able to arrange meetings to privately be with him both in hidden areas away from the Party’s eyes and ears and in public areas full of people.  Winston is impressed by this as “she obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked”(page 129).  Not only is she’s clever, she makes up for Winston’s lack of skill on evasion of the Party’s knowledge to break rules.  Despite this, she claims “she was ‘not clever’, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery”(page132).  This is interesting as, from the beginning of the book, it shows and says how Winston is smart.  This goes even further as, due to both their ages and their intelligence, it also shows how the Party affected both of them and how much due these factors.

While Winston is bothered with how the Party can easily alter history and have everyone easily believe it, Julia doesn’t really care of neither the history nor the lies by the Party.  In some ways, as Winston found out, Julia is very susceptible to the Party’s lies because, along with many other people born before the revolution, “They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening”(page 160).  This is bad for several reasons.  One major one is that being unable to see the big picture of the situation makes it hard to make a change or even realize that some things can be changed and isn’t always all powerful.  Being unable to grasp the large problem or why things are the way they are can cause people to do damage or even harm themselves or someone else and not even know or understand why.  Another major problem is that if no one cares about what is going on, then people can harm people, things around them, or themselves without even bothering to find out why.  Even worse, this makes people more manipulatable as it can be easy to just make someone harm themselves and then lead to believe that this happens because of someone else or that they are not working hard enough.

Though, Julia isn’t all that manipulatable as she is aware of many things done by the Party that Winston is unaware of.  After all, as mentioned in the book, “in some ways, she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda”(page 156).  This is shown as she discussed her theories based on her observations, such as how the Party’s purpose of dirtying the idea of sex is to make people mare sex deprived, which makes them more agitated, which they can then manipulated those emotions into war fever.  These kind of observations, despite how book-smart Winston is, would not be easily made unless a closer observation on both the Party was made as well as being intelligent in several different ways, like the street smarts Julia has.