Nerdly Advice: Love Will Tear Us Apart

Nerdly Advice: Love Will Tear Us Apart

Nov 12

For the nerd, a stable and healthy relationship is a bit like Melville’s great white whale – nearly impossible to find and simultaneously the most desirable thing and the most destructive thing to its pursuer. The only way to survive its onslaught is to cling to Queequeg’s coffin and pray for the Rachel to happen by.

Whether you self-identify as a nerd, a geek or a dork, chances are you either lack the social acumen to sustain a good relationship or lack the perspective to realize that your relationship is more important than Shepherd Book’s mysterious backstory. There are few potential partners out there who are willing to always be second behind Batman.

Why do I bring this up? Two reasons. First, yet another anger-inspiring “how do I force my girlfriend to legitimize my manchild-hobby?” article (read: how can I get my s.o. to read comics?) making the rounds among our circle of Right-Thinking People, and a conversation I had with a friend about the sorts of partners we, as nerds and geeks and dorks, seek out and how we segment our lives. It was pretty heavy stuff, and why by God someone asked me about this shit I have no idea.

My own relationship history, stretching back to the 6th grade (when a cute girl named Florence left a get well card with an interior note reading “I like you,” in my desk while I was out sick for a week) – or even back to 2nd grade (when a friend matter-of-factly decided that we were boyfriend and girlfriend and that we would get married) – to the present is a mixed bag of nerds and non-nerds. The most notable thing about that is this: there was dysfunction, drama, infidelity and a slew of other problems in pretty much all of them, regardless of whether or not they had the same hobbies as I did.

What I’m saying here is that if you’re thinking to yourself, “Gee, my life would be so much better if I could meet a guy/girl who was really into Heroes For Hire just like I am,” you’re fooling yourself. Finding the mythical single and appealing nerd of the appropriate gender (S.A.N.A.G.) is not a guarantee of smooth sailing. Some of my most profound heartbreaks have come at the hands of those nerdy girls.

Something else that you need to think about – your friends. If your significant other has the exact same interests as you and your friends, that’s not going to end well. Who is the rest of your role-playing group going to side with when they find out the cleric dumped you for not being emotionally available? Hint: the person that can heal them. In college, my friend Nick’s girlfriend was part of our D&D game, and it was always Julie’s character that got the best magic items, struck the deathblow on the dragon and got treated like a demigoddess by the guileless farmers of the Forgotten Realms.

Why? Because it got him laid. If you think that your friendships can survive unscathed when directly challenged by the spectre of sex, you and your friends must have been through some horrible fucking trauma together.

I’m not saying that dating within your social ouerve is bad. It’s not. God, if I were, I’d be quite the hypocrite right now. I’m saying that love isn’t just who your favorite Doctor is.

Advice: if you consider yourself a reasonable adult, and you think that your relationship hinges on what your significant other thinks of Frostlops or 4th Edition or Goodbye Cruel World or whether the Droid is better than the iPhone, you are doing it wrong.

If that’s you, you’re actually in love with your hobby. You’re fetishizing your geek guy or nerd girl into a physical extension of that hobby that you can do filthy things to. Because you are actually in love with your hobby and are treating the person as an accessory to that hobby.

Ironically, as much as I hear my friends (male and female) gripe about how elusive the S.A.N.A.G. is, I think it’s much more difficult to find a ‘normal guy/girl’ in a lot of cases?

Why?

Think about who you hang out with. How many of those people are single, rational members of the opposite sex who don’t have any venning hobbies or interest with you? How many of those people do they hang out with? It looks bleak.

I guess what I’m saying is that neither is easy. And it’s about who your partner is, not what your partner is into. Even if they don’t like comics.

Which brings me to my next point: you can’t force your significant other to like comics. Trying is just going to make you single again more quickly.

I understand why people do this. It’s not always just to, as I snarked above, legitimize their hobby. Sometimes, when you’re passionate about something, you want to share that thing with someone you’re also passionate about. This is the main reason that people buy Angel on DVD.

Advice: Giving people homework is not the ideal way to say, “I love you.”

You aren’t going to make people like stuff they aren’t inclined to like by constructing this Phantom-of-the-Opera-chandelier-reveal-esque moment where you go, “A HA! COMICS, GENTLEMEN!” That’s not how people work.

I don’t like mushrooms, and there was a point in time where my ex-wife would try to sneak mushrooms into food she was cooking so that she could be all, “How does that taste? Good? Because there are mushrooms in there!” It rarely worked, because I’d typically go, “Hey, did you put mushrooms in here?” That’s how these things typically go. Trying to make your s.o. play Mega Man 9 because they like Wii Fit falls into the same category – Wii Fit is an act of torture that just happens to occur on a video game console. Besides, if your significant other likes a computer that preys on their body image issues, you might want to consider counseling.

“But Jeff,” you’re telling me, “I gave my girlfriend all of Y The Last Man and she loved it!” Are you really selling her on comics, or on one comic that is extraordinarily good? As I said on Twitter yesterday, loaning someone Battlestar Galactica on DVD doesn’t mean I’ve made her a convert to television. ‘Comics’ isn’t a homogeneous entity. Hell, I love them, and there are still whole types of comics that I don’t get or creators that I plain can’t stand.

Just because you self-identify as a comics fan doesn’t meant that you need everyone around you to know what Vril Dox’s first appearance was. If that’s something you think that you need from your partner, it’s worth asking why you need it. I wrote a thing in the first issue of Grok about the clashes I had with my ex about my geekdom, and the takeaway was ‘respect the differences.’ Despite that I made that essay a bit more sunny than reality would have reflected, that advice stands. Sure, commonality brings a lot of couples together, but individuality keeps them interesting.