Geek Love
Geek Love
There’s love, and then there’s Geek Love.
Geek love is the not-so-distant cousin of Love. Geek Love shows up Love’s family reunion driving an electric car and wearing the most ergonomic shoes his credit chits can buy. Geek Love settles in at Love’s dinner table next to Long-Distance Love and asks if sexting is working out as well as the algorithms predict. Geek Love sips its wine and lectures One-Night-Stand-Love about its chances of catching a sexually transmitted disease—yes, Geek Love can be a buzzkill sometimes. When Intellectual Love walks in Geek Love cheers—they grew up together, Geek Love and Intellectual Love. They still hang out on the weekends, talking about how sad it was that Firefly was canceled prematurely or discussing the ultimate value of the Existentialist movement. Sometimes Geek Love sets Intellectual Love up with one of its friends, and vice versa. But it never quite works out. It comes close, often, but things never really go the way they probably should. Why?
Geek Love, much like quantum physics, is a bizarre and difficult thing. It demands a lot, but, much like the Law of Equivalent Exchange (Full Metal Alchemist anyone?), gives just as much. Someone recently asked how one goes about catching the eye of a particular geek—How does one land the geek of their dreams?
In most ways, landing the geek of your dreams is just like landing the non-geek of your dreams. You talk with them, find out their interests, try to find some common ground, hope that here is a mutual physical attraction, ensure that your social/political/metaphysical viewpoints don’t conflict or, at least, don’t conflict to the point of ruining everything. And on and on and on…
But with the Geek—the Modern Geek in particular—there is an added step, another hurdle added to the long list of hurdles that dating already presents: your geek secretly judges you on your level of Geek.
Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, we geeks are always looking for fellow geeks. As much as we can comprehend, understand, and respect the scientific principle that that “opposites attract and likes repel,” the Modern Geek understands that science and people are entirely different systems. If people made as much sense as science, then geeks would be gods.
Geeks have a tendency toward short attention spans. This isn’t to say that we can’t concentrate or sustain attention for long periods of time, because the computer hasn’t been built that a non-stop, three-day World of Warcraft Geek Session can’t bring to its knees! But a geek is always looking for ways to enrich their knowledge, whether it be knowledge of things they’re already familiar with (i.e. you connect with their particular Geek and bring something new and exciting to it) or whether it’s all new knowledge (i.e. you introduce your Geek to something which they may now Geek all over).
Where non-geeks may be happy settling for someone who doesn’t share their likes and interests, the geek of your choice has, most likely, gone through the vast majority of their life surrounded by people who didn’t share their likes and interests. They’re tired of that. Living among the non-geek can be exhausting. No one gets your jokes. No one’s seen the movies or read the books that you’re dying to talk about. You shout “GUYVER!!!!” and no one knows what the hell you’re talking about.
It’s sad, sad like masturbating to pictures of Betty White…just sad.
That’s why geeks have, and need, geek friends. They understand.
So in order for a geek to truly be happy in a relationship, they have to feel that they’re with a fellow geek. The particular Geek denominations don’t have to be the same (you can be as different in your particular Geek as you’d like to be) but, ultimately, a geek wants another geek. And while a geek and a non-geek can, sometimes, join together and create something beautiful and lasting, from my own experiences (and from talking with fellow geeks) I’ve come to believe that Geek longs for Geek.
So if you’ve got your eye on a particular geek, try to share their Geek. Or, better yet, bring them into your Geek.
But what if I have no Geek, you ask?
…Shenanigans!
While we sometimes lack the courage to admit it or indulge it, like it or not, there’s a geek inside us all.
-Jason Mott
End Transmission.
More Modern Geek:
Geek Defense
Geek Learning
Let’s Make a Geek
She Geeked All Over Me
3 Responses to “Geek Love”
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Hey now! What’s so sad about masturbating to images of Betty White?! …sweet Betty…
That’s why geeks have, and need, geek friends. They understand.
Part of why it was so awesome to see you last weekend!
We geeks gotta stick together!