By now you’ve probably ran across this article entitled, A Girl’s Guide to Geek Guys. Pretty entertaining and almost accurate. However, Po and I have noticed that it misses a couple of important aspects.

According to Po:

I think the essay misses a couple of important aspects of “geek” relationships in its emphasis on Trek social models.
For one thing, Trek is not the only one - nor is it even the best.  Robotech and Transformers and Warner Brothers cartoons are sometimes better models.

I would add various comedies along with cartoons… especially Monty Python and The Holy Grail. But this goes along with just about any relationship— find out what a person likes to watch when they relax, and you’ll understand that person better.

Also an understanding of role playing games will also help, since for many geeks, the closest RL relationship they’ve had has been in context of their imaginary worlds… ok, maybe that isn’t quite fair. While we may lack various social skills, we can separate virtual space from meat space.

I used to work with a woman who was very good at relating to geeks (being a geek herself helped). My wife would sometimes stop by the office and watch her in action. She would have the rest of the office surrounding her laughing at her jokes and comments, and my wife would say, “Why do they think she is so funny? I don’t get a single one of her jokes.”

I replied, “Of course you wouldn’t find her funny… you’re not a geek. They are all enamored with her because most of these guys have never seen a woman who can talk their talk.”

There is a downside to all this wonderfulness to geeks… a dark side, if you will. First, it is true that most geeks are anal … we wouldn’t be geeks if solving seemingly insignificant problems didn’t give us great satisfaction. Of course, this “feature” does bleed into the rest of our life. As Po mentioned:

She also misses the point that geek guys (and girls) are prone to detecting patterns of behavior very quickly. This can be very very very irritating to some people.

You see, geeks treat people like compilers. Coming up with the exact syntax to get a program to compile is what they do all day, so don’t expect us to treat our relationships any different. If something is bothering you, give us a compile-time error… don’t just run along for a week and then have a core dump and get all blubbery on us. We hate those kinds of errors.

If we do something you like, expect us to do it again… exactly the same. We may be highly gifted individuals in our creativity, but not always in our relationships. So if the dozen roses impressed you once, expect a dozen roses on every holiday after that. The greatest variation on that pattern may be the number of roses… and expect it to go down for less significant holidays. That’s not a sign that we love you less, it is just a sign that it is Memorial Day and that may not generate the same need for a dozen roses that Valentine’s Day did.

If this bothers you, remember the rule about a compile-time error. Tell us right then, or better yet, tell us what to buy you a week in advance. Sure it might take away all the mystery, but at least you’ll get what you want, since subtle hints will always go unnoticed.

But I think the greatest feature of a geek is their ability to learn and their relative humility in regards to all things social. You can train them to be quite attentive. Show us the knobs to tweak and the button to push, and we’ll tweak and push.