This post is purely a way for me to complain. No big messages or lessons or philosophical opining. Just griping about our society and, in particular, the negative effects I feel because of our binary gender dichotomy.
So I graduated from college some years ago. Neat. I was dating someone at the time and my friend group was mostly the same people it was in college. The number of people I met outside of that group in the three years I resided in Lexington after college was abysmal. Male or female. I'm a nerd (shocking) and an introvert to boot. I love games, and there aren't too many outlets for that that allow you to meet new people. Especially if you barely feel like you have enough energy to sit at home alone, let alone being around strangers for hours at a time.
As a result, I went to a few game nights at UK, game stores, and back to Transy respectively. I mostly didn't love any of them. I had fun, but my specific brand of gaming isn't shared by a great many people. I've got this weird mix of loving strategy games, but wanting to be casual and friendly about them. So, I met a lot of tryhard nerds and a lot of very casual nerds, and my nerdiness didn't jive well with theirs mostly. After three years, I had gained four friends gaming with strangers. Two stopped being my friend eventually for reasons that weren't disclosed to me and I drifted apart from one of the other ones since he had a huge number of interests and gaming with him was kinda' rare. So I ended my time in Lexington with one new friend alone.
What does this have to do with dating? Well, I'm one of those turbo nerds. I want to be dating someone who gets that nerdiness and participates in it with me. Sharing gaming as a hobby is one of the bigger factors in determining my attraction for someone. If, after three years of pretty sincere attempts to meet new people, I come away with one new friend, regardless of gender, that's not looking so good as far as gaming prospects go. What makes it worse is our shitty gendered binary and the attempts of neckbeards to keep gaming relegated to a solely "male" hobby (the irony of course being that they then complain about women not being gamers or respecting gamers). In several of my forays into strangerdanger land, I saw and heard a number of sexist comments/behaviors that were pretty overt. It was kinda' pitiful to watch and made it that much harder to care about meeting people in the hobby since so many of them were painfully socially inept/problematic. People treating gamer women like goddesses or commenting about women in a generalizing and demeaning fashion. Both extremes were frequent.
As one might guess, I turned to online dating after my post-graduation breakup. But the prospects there are, in some ways, much worse. Heaven forbid you're a male who wants to talk to other gamers because you're now in direct competition with about a million others no matter where you live. The extra fun problem that arises is that you can no longer use games in any respect in your first message because you will immediately come off like every other nerd guy and it will be super easy to generalize and dismiss you for that reason.
As a result, I approach women who like gaming, but I can't really talk about it despite the fact that it's my passion and I want to design games until I'm an old fart. To give you an idea, it's a bad enough problem that a large number of women gamers I see on OK Cupid will make a specific note about too many guys messaging her asking what games she likes.
Being a nerdy guy means my dating outlook is fucking grim. And I know that's an extra-first-worldsy problem to have, and I've got privilege leaking out of my eyes as I type this post. It's just unsettling to know that there's a fair likelihood I will never actually meet someone with whom there's mutual attraction and the shared hobby of gaming. And that sucks. It's getting harder to meet anyone at all, let alone like-minded individuals, people my age, people with the same hobbies as me, etc.
And I'm certainly not getting more attractive! My hair thinned to the point that I had to shave it, so now I've got that going for me. I look like a skinny middle-aged guy with baby-face. My prime was in college, both in terms of appearance and in terms of dating prospects. Everyone's getting married/settling down, and I'm still struggling to come up with a message to send to women that's sufficiently:
Interesting, but not too long, without coming off too nerdy, but still sounding passionate, with an original opening line. While recognizing that the more time I put into a message, the more of a disappointment it is when I don't get a response from one of the two people in a month I find that I'd actually be interested in getting to know better. But if I come off sounding too interested, it's weird and detracting. Noting further that since everyone is different and has different preferences/tastes, some, all, or none of the above may apply for any given person, and there's basically no one to know ahead of time, so it's a crapshoot regardless.
And because I'm a male, we're seen as the product to females' buyer status. My pitch is the TV commercial meant to get you excited enough to look into buying me. It's very easy for a commercial to be invasive or, alternatively, bland and uninteresting. I have to strike just the right chord with just the right person at just the right time to get a potential sale. But again, it's a buyer's market, so each individual I'm interested in has a hundred other guys doing the same thing.
I have no way of knowing if my inquiry/message, large or small, is contributing to a feeling of being smothered- how many of them are just sick of getting a dozen messages daily- whether or not I'm actually being original at all.
And how would I know? I don't get any messages at all ever barring the occasional "hey," so it's not like I have much to compare myself to.
So how long before I just get completely sick and tired of trying to date in a time and culture where dating as a nerd male is basically impossible? I've always thought it would be better if I was single forever, because despite wanting that companionship, I've got neuroses out the ass, and it's super hard for me to work on the intersocial ones when they're not being triggered, so I have no idea what sets them off. So, the longer I go without dating someone, the less appealing I feel like I am as a dating prospect because of unresolved issues that may or may not spring up in any future relationship!
You see the cyclical nature of this problem, yes? And this isn't really a culture where dating stuff is discussed out loud. It's a fairly private matter, so I don't really feel like I have the capacity to complain. Even if I felt like I had a right to complain, which I don't, because again, first-world-privilege oozing from my orifices.
So instead of trying to meet new people, I'm just going to curl up into an even tighter ball, watch Gravity Falls alone, and obsess about game design in my head.
As a funny aside, this rant has reminded me that I wanted to be like Scott Pilgrim when I was in high school. And as I grew older, I became more like him in the worst ways and have only recently realized what a bad thing it is to be like Scott Pilgrim.
Now I just wanna' sit on the couch and play BMO with someone I can cuddle up with.
