This work is copyrighted by Lisa Michaud, ©1997-2004. No profit may be obtained from its redistribution; any profit obtained from this work without prior consent of the author is a violation of copyright. Please do not reproduce this essay on another webpage. Do not alter the text of any copy you make in any way.

Making Contact

Whoever said that email is impersonal? For a growing number of couples, email is the way they make initial contact - the first way one touches the world of the other, sending a friendly greeting across the span of cyberspace and opening the door into a new future. This can be executed well, and it can be executed poorly. An example of the latter would be, say, something like this, from my own collection:

For a "geek" you are a good looking wench--
if i was not old enough to be your father, i would make a pass at you--- we may not be "georgeous" but we are at least capable of creating new mensas...

An example of the former would be something more like, "I enjoyed reading your guide to geek girls, it is always useful to have more reference material." This type of message could go on to talk about common interests in an intelligent, respectful way. It could steer clear of come-ons. It could try to avoid the "Me Tarzan, you Jane" approach. (You laugh? I've received three of those.) I could write an entire essay on the best way to approach a female on the 'Net - no, wait, I already did.

I have received both of these kinds of email in my inbox. Guess which type succeeded in gaining my favor? The first guy I ignored; the second, I wrote back. By the time we later met in person, I had some small feeling for his personality; he had managed to impress me as an intelligent, thoughtful individual, if perhaps a little shy with words (well, he was an engineer; what did I expect?). I liked him. I had started to flirt with him. He took this as a sign, asked to meet me in person, and later when we first stood in front of each other and peered at the other's physical persona through our respective corrective lenses, we liked what we saw enough to go out on a date, and step through the door into a category best described as a geek couple. It had begun.

The Geek Courtship

Many people have written to me since I penned the Guide to argue that some geek girls do indeed like flowers. Of course we do. In fact, in little less than a month of courtship, I had already been presented with my first rose from Dennis, and I was positively thrilled. Just because I use the term "forward compatibility" in ordinary conversation and turn my computer on before making breakfast on most days does not mean that I don't grin from ear to ear when I see a perfect, single rose with a card addressed to me sitting in a vase on the table. Even geeks can be saps, and I'm certainly one of them. Anyone else who thinks that every word of my previous essay is the gospel truth and is supposed to apply to all geeky women really doesn't get the fact that women are not, in fact, all reproductions of each other that come from some universal six-bazillion-pack or something. Once they do understand this, they can go explain it to the companies that make women's jeans.

This all goes to say that the courtship of a geek girl needs to be tailored to her individual tastes. The geek mate of a geek girl should view this as an optimization process; in order to make the courtship efficient, techniques should be adapted in ways that get the best results. In short, I like flowers, so I got flowers. I also got a printer for Christmas, which is far geekier, so I've got a large range of acceptable gifts. And I also got a lot of emails in mid-day saying that the previous day was a lot of fun, and that he was looking forward to seeing me again, and all sorts of things that gave me the cute little smiles that made everyone turn green (either with nausea or envy) at the knowledge that I was falling in love, and hard.

One of the other ways in which Dennis was a successful geek mate during our courtship was that he was not jealous of my online friendships, nor upset at the fact that just about everything he and I talked about or did was potential fodder for discussion online. This is a very important aspect for the mate of a geek girl, because men must understand that women do tend to "tell all" to their friends, and that geek women aren't necessarily an exception. The mate of the geek girl should be happy, actually, that she is describing these things to email friends who live across the continent (or across the world) and whom he may never meet, rather than women who live near him and his mate, and would see him socially. At least with a geek woman, you may never have to look her friends in the eye and wonder just how much they know about you.

In the end, if you asked me what most attracted me to Dennis during our early months, I would have to say that the main factor is (and this should be no surprise) intelligence. I tried to stress this in my earlier essay, and let me say it again: geek women don't want to mess with men who can't keep up with them. We don't want to hear "Hunh?!" when we rant about the piece of code that wouldn't work today, or get blank looks when we're thinking aloud while trying to solve a problem. That certain light in the eyes that shows comprehension is much more attractive than a glossed-over stare, and if a mate can even understand enough to get involved and help, that makes him all the more indispensible. This is why the most successful mate of a geek girl is a geek himself. Geek girls don't need to be protected, we don't need to be served, we don't need to be taken care of; but we do need to be challenged, and we like to be impressed on our own turf (that's the intellectual plane, not the muscle-bulging one, though if I really have to explain that then this doesn't apply to you), so if you don't measure up... don't bother.

Cohabitating

The progression of a good geek courtship may eventually lead to starting a geek home. Geeks living together inevitably produce an environment that has appeal to a select audience - mostly fellow geeks. Others just don't get it. Some people compliment my little collection of Star Trek figurines in the living room, or the Millennium Falcon Puzz3D model hanging from the ceiling, and some people just give us funny looks. Our apartment has that certain mark of the geek couple; the book collection is heavily slanted toward Science Fiction and Fantasy, and our Christmas tree has a small Enterprise with blinking lights. I have a Star Trek mousepad and the VCR tapes are dominated by a collection of every Babylon 5 since four episodes into the second season. Heck, we might as well hang a sign saying "Geeks Live Here" out on the front door. But the fact that geeks decorate their homes this way only stresses the importance of geeks being with other geeks, because otherwise one partner may never understand, and never forgive, the installation of a stand-up cardboard Storm Trooper in the hallway.

You can laugh. I know a couple that has one.

So how can you tell a geek household, other than these obvious decoration tendencies? Well, a geek household is one where they can cope with having only one car for two people, but not only one computer. A geek household is one in which pets have names that make obscure references which are recognized only by people who have spent either far too much time reading or far too much time watching Babylon 5. A geek household has a whiteboard covered with engineering equations in the bedroom. A geek household has more than one surge protector. It has its CDs categorized and alphabetized. All of the phones actually have their memory slots programmed. Any numbered set of VCR tapes starts with zero instead of one. And what is the final sign of a truly geeky household? Ethernet cable. Anywhere. Even in a drawer.

Marriage and the Future

When a geek union works, you just can't fight it. Ten months after the day we met, Dennis asked me to marry him and I said yes, and we joined the great and swelling ranks of the Internet couples for whom email provided a window into a permanent union.

The geek bride takes traditional wedding planning and makes it her own. She announces her engagement via email, shops for dresses on the Web, exchanges ceremony ideas on alt.wedding, and writes up accounts of her planning process in HTML. No geek approach to wedding is complete without a wedding website. What does this mean for our wedding planning? I'm doing all of the above, plus I've organized our guest list on a spreadsheet, and we're getting a database program to organize the addresses, dinner choices, gifts, RSVP notices, and delivery status of Thank You cards. And of course, our wedding program will include the URL of the wedding website.

I am a geek bride. Hear me roar.

But this is where my knowledge of being a geek couple ends, on the brink of a new future. We face many of the same issues now as do other couples. Will I change my name? If I do, how do I get my online username changed to fit? Will my email still be forwarded from the old one? What happens with my website addresses? Will we have children? Can we bear to pass on such terrible eyesight to a new generation? Or should we look forward to dressing up a three-year-old as a Minbari, complete with a newly-forming head crest? They are the same questions, I would imagine, that any couple thinks about at this time.

It has been my experience therefore that what I said in the Guide was right; geek girls and geek guys belong together. What irony that it was the Guide, in the end, that helped me prove that! So once again I say to all you geek men out there: stop what you're doing. Leave those pretty young vacant things alone, because they're never going to give you the time of day. Remember that a geek woman knows how you think and just might appreciate you for it! The result could be something as happy as I have found, and your future could be just as interesting - and frightfully geeky - as ours is right now.

Live long and prosper.