Thoughts on Beauty and the Geek
I don't know how many of you watch Beauty and the Geek (or, for that matter, how many of you still read this). But it's caused me to return to a recurring subject of thought -- why can't geeks get dates. Many, or even most, geeks are nice guys. I'd love to have a geek on the jury for a domestic violence trial, for example. It seems easy to ascribe it to their lack of social skills, but there seems to be something more.
I think it has something to do with the inherent ambiguity of relationships. There are many questions that do not admit of easy answers -- is this a date? are we dating yet? is this a relationship? To some extent, asking your partner can help and is even healthy. But one of the defining tendencies of the geek is the desire to define and categorize just about everything. And so the geek tends to want to pigeonhole the relationship to a degree of precision it is incapable of being pigeonholed.
A related difficulty the geek has is a desire to move the relationship along too fast. Some of this is undoubtedly because of past trouble the geek has had with relationships. It's hard for the geek to get into relationships, so when he gets into a relationship, he naturally wants it to be as serious as possible. But I think it goes deeper than that. The geek tends to naturally be a serious person, so it's normal for this to extend to his relationships.
It is possible that this may only apply to male geeks; I know that the second point does not apply to one of the female geeks I know. But I welcome comments on this.
I think it has something to do with the inherent ambiguity of relationships. There are many questions that do not admit of easy answers -- is this a date? are we dating yet? is this a relationship? To some extent, asking your partner can help and is even healthy. But one of the defining tendencies of the geek is the desire to define and categorize just about everything. And so the geek tends to want to pigeonhole the relationship to a degree of precision it is incapable of being pigeonholed.
A related difficulty the geek has is a desire to move the relationship along too fast. Some of this is undoubtedly because of past trouble the geek has had with relationships. It's hard for the geek to get into relationships, so when he gets into a relationship, he naturally wants it to be as serious as possible. But I think it goes deeper than that. The geek tends to naturally be a serious person, so it's normal for this to extend to his relationships.
It is possible that this may only apply to male geeks; I know that the second point does not apply to one of the female geeks I know. But I welcome comments on this.
posted by Mad Jurist at 6:53 PM
2 Comments:
i always chalked the desire to define it quickly up to inexperience. i'm not that way anymore...but back when i was eighteen, twenty years old and just dipping my toes into the whole dating world, i couldn't deal with the ambiguity. Serious, Not Serious, you-name-it...i wanted a label, and i wanted it now. i never chalked that up to my geekery...just to my lack of experience. as i gained more experience in relationships, i learned that i couldn't label things quickly, and sometimes couldn't label them at all. i don't think that has taken away my desire for certainty in other things...it just took me time to learn that relationships were a different animal.
on a less serious note, your post reminded me of a particularly awesome XKCD comic that you may or may not have seen.
I've seen all the xkcd comics, but yes, that one is particularly appropo. In general, I'm not sure it's purely ascribable to a lack of experience. I suppose that's a question only a non-geek can answer. In my experience, experience only came when I gave up the search for the definable relationship. On the other hand, that concession only came after the girl I may or may not have been seeing resisted my attempts to define the relationship. Perhaps at the end of the day, the proper response is, as facebook would say, 'it's complicated'.
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