Dating Nerds 1.0: Meeting Nerds

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So let’s say you’ve read Dating Nerds 0.1, and you’ve decided you’re going to woman-up and date a nerd (or a geek, I’m really talking about both groups because they’re pretty much the same for our purposes). You are going to buck the trends and go against what is biologically natural in hopes of becoming a nerd queen. I say, good for you. One of the points I forgot to mention in the primer is how nerd’s friends aren’t assholes and will have a “wow, a girl” reaction to your presence thereby making you a nerd queen. Don’t get me wrong, this will require a little effort, a lot of patience, and a lot of molding (once you find your nerd target), but what girl doesn’t like a good challenge?

Now, the main problems you’ll encounter in your search for nerd love will be finding nerds (they NEVER go out), picking out the real nerds from the players who pretend to be nerds (this is becoming a great pickup tactic), and finding a nerd who is suitable boyfriend material (there is no hope for many nerds, and some of those who there is hope for have already been snatched up by nerd-mining hotties like yourself who will almost never lose their nerd to another nerd-miner because nerds are loyal to their girlfriends).

The good news is that there are more dateable nerds out there than any other man category. And if you’re comfortable with some of the negatives I discussed in Dating Nerds 0.1, you should be able to be happily with one in most North American cities.

Nerds almost never go out. They take pride in not going out. They buy everything online (including their groceries), they rarely exercise, and some nerds have embraced what is becoming very popular in the nerd universe: they brew their own beer. This allows them to accomplish two treasured nerd activities: not going out and arguing about what makes “the best” beer. Nerds love arguing about what “the best” of anything is, I covered that already.

So wait, if they don’t go out, how are you going to fill your nerd love cravings? As far as I can tell, nerds only go out regularly for one reason:

1. To eat (nerds will rarely cook)

Nerds have little to no culinary experience. Whenever I’ve eaten a meal prepared by a nerd, they have tried to follow a recipe to an absolute T, and usually fail because they don’t understand some fundamental part of cooking that isn’t in the recipe (pre-heating the oven, defrosting the meat, etc.). Therefore, they can be found at chain restaurants like Subway, Quiznos, or Applebee’s surprisingly often. And the key there is how they will frequent the same restaurant day after day (nerds love routines) so you can meet them back there after you find one the first time. It’s like clockwork.

Other than that, a nerd’s life is often consumed by video games, online forums, developing open source code, fantasy sports, watching strange and awful movies for often inexplicable reasons, building massive audio/video systems they don’t really need, singing songs from Monty Python, and watching anime pornography (which isn’t that bad, by the way).

Ok, now here’s a list of nerd activities where you can meet nerds to bang it out with. Note that this list isn’t like the list above because items on this list only apply to subsets of nerds:

1. Academic conferences (GREAT place to meet nerds)
2. RPG conventions (GenCon)
3. Trivia contests
4. Anything else you think is weird and stupid that has a lot of attendees

If you manage to meet a nerd, you will have to ask him out because he won’t make the first move. Make sure the date isn’t somewhere that’s too far out of his comfort zone, and you should hook him pretty easily. I think I’m going to continue this little series with Dating Nerds 2.0 later on, stay tuned.