Where are you getting that this is a fixation? I mentioned it once, only as an example that figuring out what other people want in a partner is not a straightforward process.
Interesting point of view you express. But as one woman your opinion shouldn’t be given too much weight. With billions of women out in the world what is attractive to each one would be hard to categorize even if each individual were entirely aware and honest with regards to what they were attracted to. That said, fedoras and body funk are rarely a hit.
From a socially awkward person’s point of view the situation with regards to attraction, dating, finding a mate ARE full of contradictions. Fortunately, even though I may have some nerd like attributes they are balanced out by comeliness, wit, and athleticism so I haven’t had to suffer like a stereotypical nerd or geek.
Clearly not if you’re the one asking “what does he have that I don’t?”.
There is not single answer, but you can see some general trends if you pay attention to who seems to be getting a lot of women.
Things may be different from when I was in high school, college and in my 20s, but women tended to go for guys who were:
a) attractive
b) good looking
c) not ugly
How successful would you be if you just put your profile up on Tinder?
Are you the type of guy who
a) throws lots of cool parties
b) doesn’t throw parties but is always invited
c) wonders why he is never invited to parties
d) doesn’t go to parties and doesn’t want to go
each of these types of guys will attract a different sort of woman. They will also have different levels of exposure to meeting women.
How much time do you spend each week actively looking to meet and date women? How many women do you speak to in an average week? There was an episode of How I Met Your Mother where they determined that while Barney had slept with over a hundred women (maybe 300. I don’t remember), his actual success rate per attempt was actually very low. His point was that it was the number that mattered.
When you look at “what does he have that I don’t” guys, are you looking at boring couples in long-term stable relationships or are you looking at the jerk exes who get arrested at 2am for driving home drunk from the sex club? Which sort of guys do the women you are interested in pay attention to?
Do you tend to only focus on the sort of girls who every single guy on campus / at the office focuses on? Even if every guy “has exactly what you have”, your odds of getting with that specific girl are [every guy]:1.
Of course they appear to be full of contradictions to a nerd. Women don’t act like computers when it comes to dating. They have some sort of idealized idea of what a man should be like in their head based on their perception of their relationship with their dad, who their friends and family deemed “acceptable” and how much they wanted to pretend to rebel against that and romanticized relationships portrayed in the movies and stories they grew up with.
Wow, tough room.
I get it from the posts where you went on about how this guy must have something you don’t and that you wish you knew what was so special about him, posts where the woman who you were dating and who had already divorced him was barely even mentioned.
You have repeatedly indicated that you wanted to know what you were doing wrong, why other men are married and you’re not. I have told you why, or at least part of the reason why, and frankly I do not care enough about helping you to argue about it.
I think a lot of people have made some good points here. My own two cents, which is worth much less than that, kinda leans in the direction of ‘they bring it on themselves’. I’m extremely geeky, in that I love video games, anime/manga, comics, etc. I’ve hung out with a lot of people with the same interests, men and women, and even pursued a handful. One thing I’ve observed is that often times, the men who bemoan about being eternally single and who complain about women being shallow and only wanting the buff, jock types are just as shallow themselves. They won’t even consider a woman who deviates from their idea of a ‘perfect girlfriend’ at all. If a lady is even a little bit ‘too fat’ or ‘too homely’ for their tastes, they won’t even give her a chance. They go after the super sexy, attractive women based on their looks alone and then get upset if they’re turned down. Obviously this isn’t something that’s across the board but I have encountered it quite a bit in my life. I’m not saying that people should ‘settle’ for someone who’s not right for them but for crying out loud, don’t be so stringent in your ideal that you refuse to even consider any sort of variation from it.
What “posts”? I mentioned this, literally, once, and then answered some questions that were directly put to me. And this is all more than a year after the last time I saw this woman, so I hardly think it’s fair to say I was fixating on him while ignoring her.
Sometimes, what he had that you didn’t (metaphorically speaking) is that he actually asked her out on a date. Out loud. With words spoken directly to her. Clear words that were unambiguously intended to convey the desire to date her.
I know this is ridiculously basic, but I have seriously had to have the following conversation more times than I ever would have thought would be remotely possible:
Geek Guy: Man, I would like to date that lady over there. Why can’t I seem to get her attention?
Me: Have you ever spoken to her?
GG: Hell, no! I don’t know what to say.
Me: Something along the lines of “Hi, my name is Bob - I saw you from over there. What brings you to This Place tonight?”?
GG: And then what?
Me: You chat? If the chat goes well, you ask her for coffee or if she’d like to walk to the cafe over there and grab a snack?
GG: I couldn’t do that! What if she says no?
Me: If she’s not interested, then you can go on about your business and find another lady and repeat the process.
I know that I dated several stinkers back in my dating days purely because I was interested in dating someone and they were the ones expressing interest. When you first start dating someone, it’s doubtful you’ll know about their less-admirable traits - and most people will give someone they’re already dating a couple of free passes for fucking up before they kick them to the curb (some of us give more than a couple of free passes, but that’s a whole different discussion). But if the jerks and players and “bad boys” are the only ones who are making the effort to display a clear interest, then that’s kind of what you’re left with if you want to date.* I will also point out that the knowledge that other options exist has lead many a lady in an unhappy relationship to cut her losses.
Geeks are often (not always, but often) not especially socially confident even if they have perfectly acceptable social skills. When you’re not confident, it’s hard to be the one to reach out. But your odds of finding a ladyfriend go dramatically down if you never muster the courage to do the approaching.
*Yes, it’s retrograde and sexist that men are expected to do the approaching, and I personally did as much approaching as being approached when I was dating, but like it or not, the social norm is the men to do the approaching and a whole lot of people still view that as the default. No, it isn’t fair. Yes, men like to be approached as well. This isn’t the point, really.
That’s a good point. I do think that the acceptance of that kind of thing is a continuum as well; I know women who will have no truck with guys who aren’t well dressed, or who are into anything outside of a fairly narrow set of “manly” activities, such as home improvement, outdoorsy stuff, golfing, car-stuff, exercising, sports, working long hours, etc… because they see anything else as somehow childish and non-manly.
Then I know other women who are more tolerant of quirks- they don’t mind that guys are serious film buffs, or gardeners, or video gamers, or what have you.
They all draw the line at the point when it goes from being an interest/spare-time activity to something more obsessive or weird. For example, they’ll go to the midnight showing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens happily, but will think that cosplaying it while doing so is freaking weird. Or they might be cool with watching all of some director’s films, but will draw the line at screening his TV commercials and Super-8 films he made when he was 14. Or she may be cool with you playing video games, but draws the line at playing them for 18 hours straight each day for a weekend after the release of a new game.
That, I think is the telling thing with many of the womanless geeks of my acquaintance- they take it too far, and are either unaware that they’re doing so, or they’re aware, and unwilling to change. And all too often, they blame it on the women for being intolerant or un-enlightened or whatever. I suspect this isn’t limited to geeks alone, but geeky activities generally are tolerated less than other activities that aren’t considered geeky. So a guy can play golf all morning every weekend and that’s cool, but if he spent the same amount of time playing “Call of Duty” or watching anime, many of these women would totally balk.
Which is a double standard, but I think that over time, it’ll diminish greatly, as computer/technology stuff becomes more and more mainstream. If you’re somewhere over about 30-35, you grew up in an era where people maybe had Ataris or Nintendos, but computers or the internet weren’t really a common thing until you were in your late teens or 20s (or even later), and until then, they were the province of the geeks.
Today’s youth grew up with all this stuff- sending emails, or playing video games, or whatever aren’t considered weird at all- everyone has a phone and a tablet or computer of some kind, and that’s what you do with them.
Since this thread is alive again, I’ll just repeat that I don’t actually see that ‘geek’ guys have trouble getting the babes. I know lots of people in STEM fields, who like SF and/or fantasy, know some hobby science, and who play video games who have no problem attracting multiple women. The guys who have trouble don’t have it because they women are alienated by a show like Doctor Who which has an even gender split among fans, or because they enjoy a hobby engaged in by 60% of the US population with a 48-52 female-male split like video games, or because they have a well-paying job. They have trouble because of their own issues, some of which are associated with ‘geekdom’, and find it easier to blame their problems with the opposite sex on ‘being a geek’ rather than on their real issues.
A staple of older comedy is the wife complaining about the husband spending too much time on golf, or the husband coming up with elaborate schemes to play golf without his disapproving wife knowing about it. Disapproving of a partner spending hours on a hobby to the neglect of other parts of life is pretty universal, it’s not some kind of geek-specific thing.
Yeah, I don’t think this is such a thing anymore. I know a lot of women who are into video games nowadays. Like online dating and smoking, individuals move more slowly than society.
It seems to me that considering people who play video or online games “geeks” and seeing that as a membership card to the “geek subculture” isn’t actually sustainable any more. There is probably still a lot of overlap, and I think the overlap used to be bigger, but the circles on the Venn diagram has been moving apart for a while now. When 60 % of the population shares your hobby, you are not a subculture any more.
And…gaming is financially bigger than movies. Has been for a while. Games are not much designed by geeks any more. Geeks often work in the coding, but as far as I know, mostly the higher-up executives are old white men who would never think of themselves as “nerds”.
Also, when 13-year old boys who play some game online, removed from all consequence and showing off for each other comes off terribly hostile -that is not because they are the game turned them into geeks.
It is possible to change.
Back when I was dating, I tended to be the person who went out with the one woman in a geekish club. What did I have that the other guys did not? I asked her out. Simple as that.
When I was dating my wife, who is a scientist but not particularly geeky, I didn’t talk about science fiction, because I knew she wasn’t all that interested in it. Today she is stuck with me and my 6,000 books, but we still don’t talk about it much. We talk about things that interest both of us.
Now, if a person knows nothing but video games and sci-fi, maybe they he should broaden his horizon a bit. Without giving that stuff up.
This seems reasonable. My teenage son is a geeky/nerdy kid. But he is also reasonably good-looking (takes after his mom!) and articulate. He and his friends alternate between staying up to 3am playing Magic, and going on dates with their really cute girlfriends. And they don’t drink and don’t care - they see the crap that the “cool kids” get caught up in and want none of it. It feels very different from my high school years a few decades ago. In a good way!
OTOH, a guy who’s only topics of conversation are football and woodworking is also going to have a very limited pool of interested women, even though neither of those are geeky hobbies. Probably a more limited pool actually, since SF and video games are both broad categories that women tend to have a lot of interest in (for example on a GIS for cosplay, I saw an 11:1 female to male ratio). People who have really super narrow focus and can’t deal with people who have different hobbies/interests tend to have trouble with relationships, but the problem is the super narrow focus, not the thing they’re interested in.
I agree with the second half of your statement, but maybe there’s a generation gap or something, because you’re staggeringly high if you think that woodworking and football obsessed guys would have it WORSE than guys interested in sci-fi and video games to the same extent.
It’s not so much a matter of what has broad appeal, it’s a matter of what’s considered socially acceptable and non-juvenile. Some guy spends all weekend, every weekend in his garage doing stuff with his lathe and saws, and comes out with a spiffy chair or cabinet or something, and people tend to consider that time well spent. Football is so firmly ingrained in US society that nobody thinks anything about someone spending all Saturday afternoon and evening and all Sunday afternoon/evening watching football in the fall.
But spend similar amounts of time playing video games or watching back episodes of Dr. Who, playing Warhammer 40k, or getting your Malcolm Reynolds costume all geared up and people aren’t going to treat you the same way.
Status is important to a great many people of both genders, and to some extent, even more so with women, as some are conditioned to look for high status providers. Sci-fi and video gaming aren’t high status activities, and even if the women don’t have a personal problem with them, they aren’t going to give you the time of day if these activities are perceived as making you look low status or undesirable.
It’s like having a hairy back; it’s generally considered very unattractive. Yet when you get down to it on an intimate level, few women really balk at a hairy back any more than men really balk at some cellulite or a massive 70s bush. But few women want to be seen out and about with a hairy-backed guy- it’s all about what OTHER people think.
If I may be permitted a slight digression:
Something clicked for me the other day. Reading this thread may be part of the reason why it did. It explained a behavior of an acquaintance that has previously seemed random.
There is, or was back in the 70s/80s a section of the geek groups that could be described as the “alpha geek”. The one who had a girlfriend, and/or dated the geek girls in the subculture.
I’ve noticed recently that a few of those have grown quite comfortable with being the only one in the friend group to have a partner. Maybe it is something their self-esteem relies on, but some of them seem to try to maintain that status quo.
I’ve seen silverback alpha geeks of this sort get extremely hostile to single women, and lose interest in friends that enter a relationship. I don’t think it is a conscious thing, but I’ve definitely seen it happen.
Video gaming is no longer a niche hobby and Netflix has made “binging” a national pastime. I think you’ll find that the only people who look down on these things are idiots who still think it’s 1955.
And not for nothing, but Netflix’s biggest show to binge is about a blind superhero who wears red spandex.
I haven’t gotten high since my high school days a bit over two decades ago, so that’s not it, and I don’t think the 2 years you’re older is quite enough to qualify as a generation gap, though I do tend to date women younger than me. Judging from your comments in this thread you got married and had kids decades ago and haven’t actually tried dating since the 90s, and your dating experience did not include geeky circles and was focused on seeking a ‘mundane’ partner for status. I’m basing my comments on my experience dating in today’s world as a non-rich single guy in his 40s who plays video games, watches and reads sf a lot, and has zero interest in sports.
Status is not a single-number RPG stat, it’s something that varies in different social circles. Sure, there are social circles that run that way (especially if you take a bunch of people who did the graduate-marry-kids/corporate ladder track). But there are also a lot of people who are into SF and video games themselves - if you look at what films are setting box office records, it’s not romcoms, historical dramas, or westerns, it’s Star Wars taking the top spots from films like Jurassic Park, Avatar, and Harry Potter. SIXTY PERCENT of people in the US play video games, that’s a majority, not some weird activity only losers do. And the gender split is roughly even on average.
So the key for the geeky guy is to find women who have similar values to him, not to fish in the woodworking-ophile ‘keep up with the Joneses’ or the ‘hot chicks who hit the gym religiously, spend a fortune on hair, and hit the club looking for similarly kept guys’ pool. I really doubt that women into cosplaying (who outnumber guys 2:1) are going find the guy who shares her hobby ‘low status’, or that women binge-watching netflix are going to sneer at a guy who does, or that female gamers think male gamers are just wasting their time.
Also, there are plenty of sleazy smooth talkers out there who can’t hold down a real job but find an unending string of chicks to bang and shack up with as a lifestyle, plus a lot of drunken ‘baby’s daddy’ types, but I’m pretty sure they get their hands on the ladies even though the ‘woodworking’ set doesn’t think of them as high status. I don’t think this line of thinking really matches the real world.
Lots of people think that someone overly obsessed with football is not healthy. I know a half dozen different women who’s former husbands or LTPs are former for precisely that reason, and it’s routine to find dating advice articles and forums talking about it as a major problem.
The only times I’ve binge-watched back episodes of doctor who (or Farscape, or Angel, or Firefly) in the past five years has been at the behest of a woman who I was on at least cuddling terms with. A quick google search finds surveys that there are more than two female cosplayers to every male cosplayer, so I’d actually recommend that a geeky guy having trouble meeting women get into cosplay as a way to have a shared hobby. People treat you differently, but not in the way you’re implying.
It’s hard to take a study seriously when it describes video games as “obscure media”.
Roughly twice as many people in America regularly play video games as regularly read print newspapers. But even in today’s world, would any researcher declare print newspapers to be “obscure media”?
It also puts science fiction into the “obscure media”. In some sense I agree with this categorization, but it really depends on some careful definitions. If “Star Wars” counts as science fiction, for example, then calling science fiction “obscure media” is rather laughable.