Life with a Geek

My lovely wife Amy suggested this post.  Actually, she said something like “You should write a post about how much “fun” it is to live with such a geek”.  I’ll take that with the loving and supporting thoughts that I know she intended.

Let me give you a bit of background information first.  Amy and I have been married going on 17 years, dating for a few more than that and we’ve known each other for almost 23.  We love each other today every bit as much as we did 20 years ago, but what’s interesting is that we’re almost completely polar opposites and truly have very little in common as far as personal interests go. She had never dated a geeky guy before, but she finally came around and realized that the bad boys were just that, bad and that there might be something good in this geek.

As you’ve already figured out, I’m a geek.  I love Science Fiction, Comic Books, Computers and Dungeons & Dragons and she… doesn’t.

We only have a few television shows that we enjoy watching together. Thanks to the DVR, we manage to be able to watch our own shows as well as those few that we watch together without any conflict.  Going to see a movie together can be a negotiations exercise that would put a United Nations general assembly to shame. We usually alternate the choice between the two of us.  I avoid making her go to anything too geeky, and she thankfully spares me from most of the hardcore chick flicks.

I do get lot’s of blank stares and WTF looks, but usually only when I launch into some long diatribe about an obscure subject that even other geeks may not care about.

One activity that I dearly love is role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.  Usually we play at my friend Paul’s house, but we do occasionally play at mine.  On those nights, the geek level in the house is elevated quite drastically with 4 or 5 extra nerds in attendance.  Amy tends to make plans for being out of the house on those nights, not because she dislikes any of the guys, but I think that she just wants to give us our geek time.

Another trait that can make it difficult to share a house with a geek is our collections.  Over the years I’ve managed to amass a few thousand comic books, shelves full of Dungeons & Dragons books, Star Wars toys, Super Hero action figures, models, movie posters, collectible cards and much more.  When we built our house several year ago, we decided that I would keep my collections confined to the office room, and that’s worked out well so far.  With a defined space, I try to limit what I obtain based on where I can put it.

To top it all off, my son is now picking up many of my geeky tendencies and has even started a few of his own collections to take up space in his room.  Amy now shares the house with not one, but two geeks and she’s taking it all in stride.

While I’m sure that living with a geek can be a challenge, its got it’s perks.  There’s never a line to use a computer (we’ve got plenty to go around), most of the electronics in the house are in good working order even if they aren’t the newest models (although they may not all have cases or their original parts), and most importantly, you never have to sit on hold with an unintelligible tech support representative.