Archives for September 2012

How Do You Know When It’s Love?

September 28, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 66 Comments

A recent letter from one of my readers was a potent reminder of what I was like when I was in my teens.

It wasn’t pretty.

I was a classic otaku; I was going through the stage where the only things I wanted to talk about were anime, manga and the fact that I wanted to find The One in the worst way. To paraphrase the ever relevant 500 Days of Summer, I could blame this on an early exposure to sad British pop music and completely misunderstanding St. Elmo’s Fire¹. And in fairness, my experiences at the time validated everything I was feeling. Love was everywhere. I didn’t just have a crush on a girl in high-school or college, I had a mad, all-consuming fire in my heart for her that meant I couldn’t eat or sleep.

Well… sleep, anyway. Eating somehow managed to take care of itself, actually.

Every time I was into a girl, I was in love with her with my entire heart and soul. When we broke up (and we always broke up… usually within a few months of getting together) it was a hideous tragedy that would break my heart into pieces, set them on fire and then piss in the ashes, just for good measure.

Maybe you’re shaking your head in familiar dismay. It’s something that everybody goes through… and the we all usually have the same realisation.

It took my first serious relationship to make me realize that I had absolutely no idea what love really was… and I needed a better handle on this whole “love” business if I didn’t want all of my relationships to end in tragedy.

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and a whole host of other romantic comedies [↩]

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: Somebody To Love

September 26, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 9 Comments

Hey Doc,

I have a couple of odd little problems that you might be able to help me out with.

I’m a college senior in a good small school in a big American city. I’m a classic geek (D&D, Magic the Gathering, Firefly, indie games, comic books, anime, hell, even LARP– I’ve done them all) and also a pretty serious intellectual (science! art! contemporary and classic literary fiction! poetry! history! social science! I love it all!). I’m also a closet Asperger’s sufferer (with a childhood diagnosis from a real psychologist and everything!), but I’m generally a good enough showman to hide it.

Romantically, high school was monastic for me, and freshman year was rough. Most of college, however, has been kind. I’ve gotten laid, developed a sense of style, pushed my interest in acting further, discovered and embraced by bisexuality, gotten over my anxieties about performance in bed, and developed a nice sense of self-confidence (although some might say I have a bit too much of that now). I feel pretty good about approaching and talking to just about anyone at school, and I talk to strangers pretty regularly. I’m better at picking up brush-offs than I once was, and I do get them every so often, but I just take them in stride and move on. Now, I’ve noticed that girls and guys who I meet seem much more interested in me, and I rarely go to a party without finding some sort of hookup. In a lot of ways, life is good.

At the same time, though, I feel like I’ve lost something. Throughout my adolescence– and into the beginning of college– I built up huge passionate infatuations like a Goethe character or a Final Fantasy protagonist. These big burning passionate feelings often hurt, but when they were reciprocated, I felt like I was on top of the fucking world. I would find myself thinking about people nonstop, always eager to see them. I never had trouble being an affectionate, demonstrative boyfriend. My relationships really felt like they enhanced my life. When they broke, it hurt, but that pain was proportionate to the joy that I took in them.

I haven’t felt anything like that for over a year. I’ve had at least three relationships break apart as I found myself having trouble getting myself to want to spend time with the other person– even to have sex. I’ve met plenty of people who I clicked with as friends, and plenty who I’ve wanted to fuck, and a few who were a little of both, but never the double-barrelled shotgun blast to the head of intense romantic love. I felt like it might have been starting to happen over the summer, but she left me, and, two days later, I found that I didn’t really care.

In the words of a man whose voice is liquid golden sex, “Can anybody find me somebody to love?”

Is something wrong with me? Is this just what growing up is like? Or do I just have to be patient and go out and try to meet more and more people?

The other question is about personality and image. I know that in less than a year, I’m going to be shoved out of the protective cocoon of undergraduate life and into the bright sunshiney daylinght of reality (or grad school). And at that point, I’m going to get a chance to redefine myself again.

I feel like I really am, at heart, a consumate pop-culture geek and an intense pan-disciplinary intellectual. At the same time, I worry that my esoteric tastes and interests will alienate many potential friends and partners if I focus too much of my attention on them. And I really don’t want to be lonely. I could see myself drifting towards being a high-rolling offices-and-suits guy, cheerful art-loving hipster craft beer drinker, or flamboyant gay man instead, in order to appeal to a wider crowd. How should I negotiate this? I’m tall, brilliant, energetic, cheerful, funny, and, I’m starting to think for the first time in my life, handsome. How should I use that to shape myself to present to others while remaining true to what I really love?

Thanks a bunch.

Sincerely,

Not Freddie Mercury

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Paging Dr. NerdLove Episode #07: Escape The Friend Zone

September 25, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 15 Comments

The Friend Zone is the bane of every nerd’s dating life, the Phantom Zone to their romantic General Zod. This week, Dr. NerdLove and his guest Cat from the League of Extremely Ordinary Gentlemen are here to be your guide to every aspect of the Friend Zone; what it is, how to avoid it in the first place and, critically, how to escape from it if you’ve found yourself stuck there.

Got a dating issue that you need Dr. NerdLove’s help with? Call (512) 522-6513 to record a question for the podcast.

Don’t miss a single update! Be sure to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and RSS

Check out this episode

Fake A Gamer

September 24, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 56 Comments

I’ve gone on before about my feelings on the supposed plague of faux geek girls before, but occassionally something comes along that requires that I revisit the topic. And occasionally I turn out to be wrong.

But not in the way that you would think.

Y’see, the idea of “fake geek girls” as exemplified by the profoundly stupid “fake geek girl” meme out is that there are women out there pandering to nerds for “attention”… because there’s nothing women love more than attention from people they would (supposedly) not spit on if they were on fire. The usual suspects – the Frag Dolls, adult actress April O’Neil, Adrienne Munn – get trotted out repeatedly to prove that fake geek girls exist because… evidently they failed some geek shibboleth somewhere along the way or something. I dunno.

Getting fussed over hot women who may or may not be “true geeks” – for whatever arbitrary definition of “geek” you might want to use – not only misses the point, but ends up distracting people from the people who really are pandering to nerds by pandering to them and insulting them at the same time.

After all, everyone knows that geeks, nerds and gamers are desperate virgins who would stab their grandmothers for a chance at banging out. That’s like, the first thing that comes to mind when you think about geeks; they’re sexless slabs of greasy manflesh coated in acne and Cheeto dust who would bust a nut if a woman would deign to talk to them at all.

There are plenty of people who are perfectly willing to trade off of those stereotypes to their advantage. They think you’re idiots who only think with their genitals. They think you’re so desperate to get laid that you’ll try anything that promises to hook you up with a hot willing chick, especially a Geek Girl. And they want your money.