Nerd Love Can Happen

There are many reasons why I love my husband. He is kind, funny, generous, and always great to be around. For the most part, he always puts others before himself (although there are some exceptions to that one). No matter how I’m feeling, he can usually make me feel if not 100% better, at least less thrown into an inescapable soul-crushing black hole.

He is also a total nerd.

Don’t take that as a slam; this is actually one of the things that drew us together. As evident by my MWSN and 90s Kid Throwback postings, I am quite the nerd myself. I had very few friends throughout my school years, but that was, and still is, who I am. I can try to hide it, but it would fail epically, and I don’t have that kind of time or energy.

It took me many years and tears to accept and embrace this fact, and since the awkward geeky girl usually only gets her someone special in guilty pleasure rom-coms, I started to resign myself to the fact that just maybe I wasn’t going to be that girl. Then I met TJ.

I won’t go into the back-and-forth that was us before we went on our first date, but I will say that we found out in conversation the day we first met (which was in 2005; we started dating in 2007) that we were in many respects exactly alike. In fact, the very first thing I noticed behind the counter where he was working was his copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I asked him, “Is that yours?”, he told me it was, and that led into a discussion on movies, TV, anime.. you name it. And the cool part? WE LIKED THE SAME STUFF! AND HE WAS OKAY WITH MY NERDINESS! In fact, he really liked it!

Our first date was, as I said, in 2007. By then he was my dad’s best friend (still is) and one of mine (again, still is). We’ve been inseparable since and got married last March. We both love our comic book superheroes, and our quirky offbeat movies like “Ghostbusters” and “Back to the Future.” We can discuss fictional characters as if they were real, and we have a habit of speaking in movie quotes. One of our favorite pastimes is a version of 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but using only one connector and rarely Bacon himself. We read books and pass them between us just so we can discuss them. He’s my go-to for numbers and such while I’m the history and lit nerd. We truly have found, as the Chobits character Chi might call it, that “Someone Just for Me.”

I wasn’t writing this to be all lovey and mushy, although I do feel that way. My point in this article is to reach out to the nerds like me who give up on ever finding someone who can love them for who they are. Trust me, it can take a while, but it does. There are amazing, nerdy men out there who probably feel the exact same way. The trick is not to feel like you have to be someone else in order to get the unattainable jock that Molly Ringwald always pined after. Nerdy girls can be sexy and appealing, too. You just have to wait for someone to come along who can appreciate it. As the title says, nerd love can happen. It did for me.