Nerdly Advice: Number of SWAT References = 1

Nerdly Advice: Number of SWAT References = 1

Mar 09

Nerds have questions, but nerds have to appear authoritative or risk losing their nerdy cred.

That’s why, as a recurring feature on Alert Nerd, Jeff answers these conundrums anonymously. It’s like Anne Landers as written by Wyatt Wingfoot. We call it Nerdly Advice.

Dear Nerdly Advice,

I have a friend who’s in a big romantic rut right now.  He’s your quintessential video game nerd: owns an Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and has them all hooked up to his 46″ flatscreen, plus has a running subscription to a major MMORPG for the last five years or so.  He was single for about five years then in early 2009 he met a girl on MySpace, but he’s not met her yet.  This has been going on for a little over a year at this point and she keeps coming up with excuse after excuse after ridiculous excuse for why they can’t meet in person quite right now.  He lives in central CT and she’s in New York City, so it’s far from a hassle to take a day- or weekend-trip.  The thing is that I don’t think she’s ever going to make good on her promise to meet up.  He’s put so much effort and emotion into this girl and gotten nothing in return except tons of broken promises.  I want him to go out and meet other women, but most of his time is spent either online with the MMORPG or with his video games, not to mention that he’s extraordinarily devoted to making this situation with NYC girl work out.  I’m worried because I see a lot of my past romantic self in him, when I did nothing but read comics at home and wonder why I didn’t have a girlfriend.  It wasn’t until I listened to friends and family that I got out of the house, went back to school part-time and met the girl I’m currently involved with.  I am trying to help him realize that (a) – NYC girl needs to be put on the back burner and (b) – finding a world outside of Bioshock is a step towards finding the special someone he desperately wants to connect with.  I know it’s always harder to hear this from the friend who’s got a girlfriend, but I feel like it’s something he needs to hear.  I don’t know how to tell him any of this without sounding like I’m berating him or trivializing his problems.

Thanks,

—-Exasperated In Connecticut

“…he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods

Dear EC,

The gamer-hermit is, in his or her way, the modern version of Walden‘s John Field – kept poor by their own circumstances and counting it prosperity by its difference.  I know a few, trapped in a vicious cycle of gaming, working to afford the gaming, gaming to escape from the working – the life of the gamer-hermit, more starkly than the rest of our lives, is a cycle of escape necessitated by the need to escape.

I’ve got a friend like this. I’ve known him most of my life and he plateaued at the end of high school while the rest of us kept moving. He went back to his old high school job post-college and while the rest of us have gotten married, gotten divorced, had kids, bought homes and settled down, he’s just spinning his wheels and using his job as a feeder for his Warhammer Online play and drunken nights in front of the PlayStation. He’s never had a serious girlfriend.  He doesn’t even attempt to date.  At least not with actual people.  When we were younger and dumber, we inadvertantly discovered that he was romancing a member of his Everquest guild.  And I’ll get back to that in a minute.

If you want to confront your friend without berating him, try not berating him. Better still, try not focusing on his gaming habit. Take it out of the equation completely. It invalidates the hobby and, by extension, him and that’s just going to make him defensive.  If you want to get through to him, you’re probably going to want to focus on how much you want to spend time with him.  This might also be a good place to start having ‘spare tickets’ to ball games and concerts or ‘being short a man’ at bar trivia.  His guild needs him, he’s going to tell you, so make sure that you need him, too, or you’ll lose. It’s extra work, yeah, but start to build a bridge to bring him back into your flesh and blood life and maybe he’ll cross it.  Heck, have a game-themed party and be sure to invite a few single girls who might be into him.  Don’t judge him too harshly and don’t make it an ‘us-or-them’ proposition.

And be careful, EC.  There’s a danger here, I think, in the circumstance being too personal for you.  It’s a natural impulse to share the grand revelation you had about life with the people you care about that can benefit from your wisdom. I’ve done it myself, tried to steer the people around me who I ‘see too much of myself in’ and I have successfully alienated those people time and again because those people are not me, nor am I those people.  The monomythic story structure even has this rejection of mentoring written into it; that’s how universal this is.

Now, the Internet Girlfriend. That’s a whole different bomb.

I don’t have flowery quotes for you on this one.  Because the only way that talk can go down is fast and hard, like Gamble shooting the hostage.

Look, I know enough people who have met online and been really happy that I can’t say anything bad about the prospect of cyber<3 by default.  Sometimes people click, and you can’t help the circumstances under which they do so.

There are four possibilities for the consistent missed connections:

1. She’s lying about something and dodging him so that he doesn’t find out

2. She’s actually a dude (this is a subset of 1, but a significant enough problem in its own right)

3. This is some sort of scam

4. As implausible as it sounds, she’s been telling the truth the whole time.

If it’s anything other than the last one, then he probably needs to have an awakening about this sooner rather than later. He needs to be told.  But he will never, ever listen the way you want him to. No one ever does.  Just like you wouldn’t listen if he came to you and said that your girlfriend was a monster (and I don’t know her, man. She’s probably really cool).

The relationship isn’t the problem.  There’s a problem underneath it that the relationship salves, and that’s likely a general lack of success with real-life women.  That’s something that you can’t make happen for him, unfortunately.  But there are ways to convince him that he deserves better than what he’s getting.  No matter what you do, I’d avoid using yourself as an example for the reasons I’ve already stated.  Ultimately, the best way to get him to get over his MySpace fantasy (and also, really? MySpace? 2009?) is to coax him into interacting with real girls.  This doesn’t mean ‘blind dates!’  This means pressure-free social situations.  A bad blind date does more to undermine confidence than 8 years of constant bullying.

So, really, that’s it.  Treat him with respect and not like a project.  There’s nothing unhealthy inherently about his interests. He shouldn’t be encouraged to ditch them entirely, because he’s just going to resent that eventually. In a perfect world, he’s going to find a girl who likes the things he likes. I mean, I bonded with my girlfriend over the Nic Cage Wicker Man, among other helplessly nerdy things.  He just needs to be confident enough in himself to put himself out there, like in that one Daniel Johnston song. Right now, it seems like his gaming habits are replacing that confidence and that’s what’s unhealthy about them.