Wil Wheaton wrote an amusing piece about how his non-nerd wife had apparently been infected through “nerd-adjacency” over the last 13 years. This came about because she made a Star Trek red shirt joke. It got me to wondering if poor Kim was destined for a similar fate. I can’t quite imagine her making contextual Sci-Fi jokes, but then she’s still short of the decade plus exposure that Wil’s wife has endured.
However, the larger message in Wheaton’s piece was simply that his wife “gets him,” and he values that. I grok it. And I’m also encouraged that apparently the geeky and non-geeky can have a lasting healthy relationship.
I don’t think Kim can really relate to my geeky side, but she does seem to understand it. She’s happy to catch up on her sleep while I watch television. She even took me to see the new Star Trek movie and listened politely to my post-game analysis. She’s eye-rollingly amused by stories of my dinnertime conversations with my kids, which the other night involved artificial gravity waves and whether or not the geometric foci of elliptical gravitational orbits needed to be be physical objects. (Tyler started it!) And she even finds me handy when her computer isn’t working.
While I certainly value her giving me space to be me, I also value that she makes me more than that. She anchors me to the real world and socializes me in ways that I know I wouldn’t or couldn’t on my own. I’m honestly grateful for that, even though sometimes I’m sure I appear resistant. Finding someone who can cause you to be better without demanding that you change is kind of the holy grail of relationships. And I do recognize that I’m a lucky man.
I suppose maybe this is one of those cases where opposites attract—and in situations where each is able to appreciate the value of the other, it seems that works. She makes me human, and I keep all her gadgets running. What I don’t get is that she could just buy tech support. But maybe I should shut-up while I’m ahead and hope she doesn’t figure that out… at least before she’s assimilated into the geek collective. Sorry Love, apparently resistance is futile.
You might be right that I can’t necessarily relate to the geeky side (meaning I don’t understand much of it), but I do understand that it is a very big part of who you are. I love that you are smart enough to get all that “stuff”. The question you and/or the article you reference brings up is how geeks and non-geeks can fall in love and make it last. Answer: I didn’t fall in love with you because you are geeky, but because you are you… the geeky side is just one part of that. There are so many other sides that you don’t see in yourself, that I do see.
You are absolutely right about one part of it, we should never question why it works so well and just be very grateful that it does. This kind of relationship is something that many people only dream of finding in their lives. We get to live it. We are lucky indeed.