...or get off the pot

Carpe diem which is Latin for "shit or get off the pot" (not really). In dating, you need to grab the bull by the horns, b/c yeah unfortunately for us nerds, the meek do not prosper (I think I've just mixed like ten metaphors in this paragraph).

I know a lot of people (nerd guys especially) that sit and mope and pine after a girl for what seems like forever. You as a geek also probably know a lot of people who do this, and it is likely that you have also engaged in this type of behavior. I know I did.

Pining while romantic and it's what all the people did like in the Jane Austin and Bronte books, it is not productive (how many of them died with unrequited love?!). When you love from afar, you probably have a distorted idealized view of the person. Despite the fact that you think you know a lot about her, you don't know what it would be like to date her, b/c you haven't dated her. You might have seen her date other people, but you haven't dated her and it is not the same.

It's possible that she likes you back and you'll never know unless you try. Here's really how this all breaks down:
*She doesn't know you like her, she likes you.
*She doesn't know you like her, she doesn't like you.
*She knows you like her, and she likes you back but is waiting for you to make a move.
*She knows you like her, but doesn't like you back and can't tell you that b/c you haven't told her yet and therefore you won't be able to move on to a girl who would like you.

In all of these situations, it's better to just ask the person out in an non-ambiguous way and b/c she either likes you or she doesn't and if she doesn't, you can move on instead of waiting and waiting and waiting for her to notice.

Ultimately doing nothing and sitting around idolizing a girl makes you emo and annoying. And if the girl you like ends up dating someone else b/c you're sitting on your butt, you're just going to get more emo b/c you'll think things like, "why didn't I ask her out, that guy's a jerk, I'd be a way better boyfriend." Well sucker, you didn't ask her out, so who's fault is it? Emo gets you no where, being bold and directly asking someone out gets results and even if they aren't the results you want, at least something happened, change happened and with change comes the possibility of better things.

So grab the bull by the horns. B/c honestly, would you rather be alone and depressed and mopey or find out how they feel and possibly start a new relationship or be freed to find a new possible partner? If you really would rather just be mopey, go find someone else to whine to about how awesome so and so is...b/c you know what I think--carpe jugulum--I mean, carpe diem.

Dude or Chick: or how to tell if your online girlfriend is a guy

You've all heard the story, guy meets girl on the internet. She's funny, smart, interested in the same things you are, and when she sends you a picture of herself, she's pretty smoking hot. And then you find out--it's a man, baby! (You have to hear that in an Austin Powers voice).

Not only is this sad b/c you really liked this girl, but if your guy friends found out about what happened, you know they're going to bring it up forever. On your wedding day, your asshole best friend is going to talk about that in his toast or something. So how can this tragedy be avoided?

First, like all deals, if she sounds too good to be true, she probably is. (Unless this online girl is like me or Felicia Day, although I'm not saying I'm as awesome as Felicia Day b/c I'm unlikely to do MMORPG based 80s style pop videos sorry, got distracted, had to watch like three videos of Felicia Day singing. Where was I?) Oh, if you meet a hot elf chick and she's perfect and she's more awesome than all your best guy friends and you have everything in common and she's hot IRL too, then you have to start wondering what are the odds of that happening? It's not impossible but you should make sure she's a girl before you start texting her pictures of your junk.

Is this similar to what your online girlfriend looks like? B/c girls this pretty generally don't live on the internet. They're off being hot and popular-like.

Second, if she never wants to talk to you on the phone or meet IRL and you've been online dating for a while. I'm not talking about you met last week and now you're in love but you've known each other for a while and you think it could be really serious, things generally start moving from online to the real world. But instead of calling, she always insists you text or she can't call b/c she doesn't have long distance (who doesn't have long distance nowadays? it's not like 10 years ago when I was in college and no one had cell phones!) Not wanting to meet IRL is a bit different. There are a lot reasons why a girl might not want to hurry and meet random people from the internet. There are a lot of girls who've gone to meet some guy and not come back so it's actually ok if she's cautious. But if it's gone on a long time and you guys live locally, meeting in a neutral location is possible. Bookstores and cafes are common meeting spots. Basically if you two are pretty serious and you haven't had any confirmation that she's a real person and not just pictures someone downloaded from a J-pop site, then start to wonder.

Third, there are discrepancies in things she tells you. Facts and names of people are changed, dates change, she's told you about ten majors she's had, things like that. If she's dishonest in one aspect, what else could she be lying out? While not being a liar doesn't automatically make her a dude, if it's in conjunction with a lot of other warning signs, start seriously thinking about it. Of course dating a liar in general is bad, even hot women liars.

And if you think this stuff doesn't happen, my brother's friend in high school used to pretend to be a girl online and would send guys a picture of a really cute Japanese girl and say it was him. Why? B/c he's weird, that's why. Some dudes are just jerks. That was 15 years ago in the infancy of the internet, and now we've had 15 more years for weirdos to perfect their art, so yeah, don't get scammed. Make sure your online girlfriend is indeed a girl. Oh, but like if you do meet her in real life, you are NOT allowed to like grab her crotch to double check, NOT COOL.

Should You Pay?

This is a sort of continuation of the differences between different dating sites post I made a while ago. I was reading the latest OkCupid blog post and I wanted to comment on it.

It claims that basically subscription based dating sites aren't worth your money and then goes about why it's bad... I'm not necessarily going to refute those claims b/c some are valid, as according to their math, a lot of people on eharmony and match aren't paid users and can't respond. I'm only going to state what I know about the services.

The OkCupid blog states that when you're on eharmony, 93% of the profiles are not subscribers and therefore they won't be able to respond. This is probably true. When I was on, there were a lot of guys who never wrote back, they didn't even bother just closing the match. At least you'd hope people would have the courtesy to close the match just so your inbox can be cleaner. :P This is probably true with match as well. There are probably lots of non-paid for subscriptions which means you're messaging into the void.

On the other hand, eharmony only gives you a specific number of matches per day. So if you messaged all of the people who sounded promising, hopefully some are paid subscribers, so it's not like shooting into the ocean, you're shooting into a barrel. Match however is like shooting into the ocean and I just don't like the free for all/meat market mentality of it.

Secondly, it seems that a lot of their math is not that accurate. By no means am I a math expert but they're making some crazy broad assumptions. For example, "Now, according to the U.S. Census, there are 89.9 million single Americans. Let's assume they're all 'single and looking.'" (emphasis added but not the quotations.) Holy crap dude, that's a gigantic assumption!!

I'm not trying to defend eharmony and match but still! Also, I notice that OkCupid did not put up their user statistics and how many marriages or engagements come from their website, not that their website is necessarily geared towards the long term relationship market.

Which brings me to my next point. Maybe I'm going to be an elitist snob here, but I'm going to say it, "you get what you pay for." OkCupid is free. I love free sh#t. But I also know that free tends to be crappy too. So yeah, OkCupid is free b/c you're going to end up with a lot of skeezy cheapass people who may or may not be looking for serious relationships. Maybe not everyone is out there looking for a serious relationship, but I don't know how to give advice on playing the field.

Technically eharmony has it's free communication weekends (generally holidays) where there is a mad rush of people messaging each other and hoping that the other person responds before the weekend is over. I mean while this is a nice service and a trap (it's a trap!) to try and get people to pay if they meet someone cool, overall I didn't find it very useful unless you want to spend the weekend glued to the internet b/c you have to jump through a lot of hoops on eharmony where you have to wait for the other person to respond before you move to the next step. So basically in a normal free communication weekend, you can probably only move two more steps before you're blocked again. Ok, so the free communication weekends are more of a trap than of a real benefit to a user esp since they tend to only roll around once every couple of months.

My conclusion is, most of these companies are going to use misleading information to try to an entice someone into joining their website so they can profit. OkCupid although free is not some non-profit organization designed to help people find their soulmates. I think if you understand that someone is trying to profit off your single-ness then ultimately it becomes less about the service and how it fits what you're looking for in an online dating site. I feel that they cater to very different groups of online daters, you can tell by the way they've even designed their websites that they have different target audiences.

If you must, you must

And I refer to dating a non-geek. Now if you've read my earlier blog post on the topic (wow I was going to link to it but now I totally can't find it, FAIL!) you'll see that I'm rather strongly opposed to dating non-geeks. I think that although you can bridge stuff like age, and race, and religion, nerd culture is a think unto itself and being a geek can bring together people of all kinds and make them friends b/c they're geeking out over Iron Man 2. (omg, so excited it's coming out this week! yay!)

But I suppose there are good reasons why someone would date a non-geek. Although I haven't dated a non-nerd, I have friends that are not nerds and it's probably a similar idea. Even though you might not have a lot in common with them, your personalities just click really well. I suppose this could happen with a relationship too. After all, I think I did say that similar hobbies are only part of determining chemistry. I'm sure you know people with whom you have a lot of hobbies in common with but just don't get along with them, well, this is the opposite. And having a similar outlook on life and stuff like that is very important.

So how can you make it work? Couple of tips that I can think of:

1) Honesty-- don't go into a relationship hoping to change the other person. You're not going to make them a geek and they're not going to make you "normal". Well I guess one of you might "win" but really they're not going to be completely happy and shouldn't you like someone for who they are currently? I mean this has happened to friends before and I just don't understand why you'd want to do this. It makes me sad when people ask their SO's when they're going to give up playing D&D. So yeah, don't go into a relationship hoping to make someone a geek or not a geek. Date them for who they are, and maybe they'll start playing board games but don't expect them to join the 501st with you and dress up like a stormtrooper (yum, stormtroopers!).

2) Giving each other space-- this is important in relationships, the ability to respect each other's space and boundaries. Yeah yeah, you're in love, you live together, but that doesn't mean you're attached at the hip (all the time). I think it's vital to give each other space and time to do the things they want to do, especially if the other person doesn't enjoy it. One person likes to bike ride? Then bike ride with friends. One person likes to play video games? Give them time to video game away. Use the time they're away to enjoy other things, like painting minis, shopping, gardening, watching old episodes of dr. who, whatever floats your boat. Don't use it to think about why you can't be together at this time and like hound them on the phone asking them when the game is going to be over. You're just going to get them into trouble and you'll hear a lot of whipping sounds in the background. It's not good, so learn to be happy alone for a couple of hours.

3) Something in common-- even if the other person isn't a geek, maybe they do get nerdily excited about strange things like cooking or dogs or flower arranging. I think you can bond over these things. Get excited about whatever they get excited about, take interest. It doesn't have to become your new favorite thing but you should try to at least understand why it's important to them so if they want to talk to you about it, you can stay something more intelligent than, "that's cool." If there is something you both really like to do together, job or eat out or whatever, then that's great and do that.

4) Don't neglect your SO-- this is the deathtrap. It's important to give each other space, but don't neglect each other and their needs either. If you game, don't ignore the other person b/c you're finishing up a quest. So I guess this really is, be considerate. No one wants to drive over to see you and then be stuck watching you kill the boss...unless they're really into that, but honestly, that's probably not most non-geeks.

So I guess those are the main things that will help maintain a geek/non-geek relationship, although they can be applied to all relationships really. Dating a non-nerd might be more work, but could also be more rewarding too? You won't know until you try. :)