I am a 32 year old man. My brother, sister, and most of my contemporaries have long since settled down and started procreating. But, here I am, still prostituting myself to the gods of interwebs dating, trying to find "The One." Or even just "The One who doesn't annoy the shit out of me the first time we meet." So, are there special impediments to dating as a scientist? (Or, can I at least tell my mother that there are, so I appear to have some sort of excuse?) Sure! Here are a few:
- Time. I know everybody's busy, and there are plenty of jobs that require just as much time commitment as being a researcher. But scientists have a special relationship to time. We have to work when the instrument is available. We have to be there to watch our gel. We have to come back in at 9PM to take the cells out of the incubator. Want to go out Wednesday night? Sure! Except that I have trap time Wednesday night, and then I have to be in at 6AM to start an incubation. Trying to set up a date around these constraints is like trying to color between the lines, whereas love is like scribbling all over the page with a red sharpie. They're not compatible. You can have your cells, or your romantic weekend in Tahoe, but not both.
- Location. Most universities are in shitholes. Take it from me: I spent seven years in Urbana, IL. Dating in a town like Champaign-Urbana is not pretty. That's why most graduate deparments with a reasonable gender ratio are incestuous to the point of nausea. By year three, everybody has slept with everybody. (Luckily, the physics department generally doesn't have that problem, since the gender balance is so skewed that "dating" within the department is only slightly better than "dating" in a prison.) And, if you're a postdoc, kiss even that goodbye. I don't take classes, I don't get invited to student functions, and if I did, I would be the old man in the room anyway. But even here, in Palo Alto, which is a cosmopolitan mecca compared to Champaign-Urbana, location is a problem. You live in San Francisco? Sure, I only live a 40 minute drive away (if it's not rush hour.) Wednesday night? Sure, I can take off from work at 7, meet you there at 8, we can spend all of two hours together, and then I can go home. Oh, that's assuming I don't have the trap that night. (See "Time" above.)
- Social Retardation. This one kind of speaks for itself. Because, seriously, if you had an ounce of charm, would you have majored in physics? No, you'd have been having way too much sex in college to have the time to study for that kind of shit. This one does get better with age, though, fortunately. Silicon Valley, for all its flaws*, is full of women who think nerds are hot. But, the average Silicon Valley nerd is a BSE working at a software company, and, as nerd cred goes, the physics Ph.D. is pretty much the trump card. This helps compensate for the fact that, at parties, I would rather stare at my drink and try to calcuate the Reynolds number in my head than risk the potentially devestating consequences of talking to a woman I've never met.
- Inability to Lie. I know this is one of my problems, and I think it's a problem for scientists in general. Example from a recent date: a girl tells me she likes acupuncture. The correct response would have been, "Oh, that's interesting." The response I gave: "Acupuncture is bullshit." She gamely tried to describe her positive experience with it, to which I responded, "Yeah, well, the placeob effect is very powerful." She said, "Well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree." This, for a normal person, is a red flag to change the topic as fast as possible. Not for yours truly, though! I proceeded to explain that there is no empirical evidence supporting acupuncture, no scientific model for how it should work, and basically tell her that she is wrong, wrong, wrong. Why would I do this? Simple: I cannot tell a lie. Faced with a factually incorrect statement, I am constitutionally incapable of letting it drift off into the aether uncorrected. Other things I am unable to lie about: how much I like you or don't like you, how much I disliked the restaurant that you chose, how annoying your best friend is, and how much I want to sleep with you. (On the up side, I don't really want to date somebody who thinks acupuncture is for real anyway.)
*The huge imbalance in the male:female gender ratio being the most obvious. The usual trope about dating in Silicon Valley, from a woman's perspective, is "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."
18 comments:
This was FUNNY - especially how you can't lie. It's funny cuz it's true!
Okay, I'm a scientist. And single. And I've been single for a while. But, I mean, really? Come on dude. What this really boils down to is "Why Dating Emotionally Unavailable, Over-Scheduled, Non-Compromising Narcissists Sucks".
Among the myriad of questions raised by your comment are a) how can I be a narcissist and believe that I'm socially retarded at the same time, and b) have you considered having a sense of humor artificially implanted? It might even help you with dating.
:)
Oh Matt, One day, you'll meet her - someone very special; someone who won't press charges.
For some reason, I could totally visualize you sitting at a table with some girl and exclaiming, "Accupuncture is bullshit!" when I read this. And then I laughed really, really hard.
Oh, Mattsy. This is so, so you.
I have gerat sympathy with your plight except for Inability to Lie. Oh, I;ve suffered from this condition horribly, despite being (back when I was young) very good-lucking and NOt A Scientist. But it is mislabeled. It is not Inability to Lie. It is a combination of Inability to keep Your stupid trap Shut and Inability to Know Whether What You Think You KNow Is True or Not. (see: The Importance of Being Stupid, as shared by your own bad selfTo wit, so the majority of acupuncture can be plausibly explained by the placebo effect. That doesn not disprove acupuncture any more than it explains that mysterios wonder, the placebo effect.
While it IS often frustrating being a member of the minority of earthlings that cares enough about intellectual honesty, epistemological integrity, observational objectivity, and other big-word pair-bondings (with or without semantical sex), that doesn't mean You're right Most of the Time. You may be factually more correct more often overall than most people, but you're still wrong most of the time because you're a homo sapiens which means you have (to paraphrase a quote from Paul Parks) "enormous reservoirs of untapped irrationality".
to be continued
Your fellow homo saps don't necessarily want your enlightend perspective on what you believe to be The truth; in fact they might not even *need* it. (This latter was difficult for me to grasp.)
The 'correct' response to young miss Ilike Acupuncture is neither 'that's interesting' nor 'acupuncture' but, 'what do you like about acupuncture'? You are, upposedly, interested in getting to know her, after all, not get acupuncture (except as a touchy metaphor for sexual congress).
As a self-styled scientist, you should know better than to lead with your dogma, no matter how well-examined you feel are the premises on which it stands. Dating is RESEARCH. Dating is inquiry. Dating is not 'will this experiment vindicate my as yet unconfirmed theories about microdot photoagitation' (I made that up, not being a scientist but merelt an aging quid nunc). Dating is Who IS This Person coupled with Do You Wanna Screw?
You claim you cannot tell a lie. We both know this is evidence of your inability to reliably tell the truth.
What you want, says I in my most biased voice, is a woman who is neither afraid to answer nor ask meaningful questions. She need not know Brownian motion from a Black Cow, but she needs to be curious about life and willing to expand her horizons.
What you need to offer her is a willingness to expand those horizons without recourse to your decades of scholarly achievement and the many many great big books you've read, but instead, your ability to ask her why she likes what she likes, or doesn't like what she doesn't like, adn then listen to her answer without requiring it fit into your exhaustivelt superior data base. Instead, she needs you to use your scientific wisdom specifically upon her and her understanding of herself and life.
and continued yet more...
and furthermore
What I believe you need to offer her is a willingness to expand those horizons without recourse to your decades of scholarly achievement and the many many great big books you've read, but instead, your ability to ask her why she likes what she likes, or doesn't like what she doesn't like, adn then listen to her answer without requiring it fit into your exhaustivelt superior data base. Instead, she needs you to use your scientific wisdom specifically upon her and her understanding of herself and life.
"How do you think acupuncture works?"
"Tadi ya nerve centers chi mental moonbeams.."
"I've heard that too. I;m not sure the evidence supports it, having researched the topic considerably, but that hardly matters if it helps, right?"
"Exactly. So... you don;t think it's mental moonbeam chi?"
"Well, no, but then I don;t really know how it works, other than that ALL medicine works part of the time via the Placebo Effect."
"Placebo effect? That's like where they give you a sugar pill and tell you it's, like, real medicine, right?"
"Right. It's actually from the Bible, some Latin word that means 'I shall please'. Some people think it means bullshit phony medicine but the fact is that there's a measurable increased healing rate when the placebo effect is sued. Like, you know, the old-fashioned doctor's bedside manner. A doctor with a good bedside manner tended to heal his patients more than one without. All other things being equal, that is, you know, the kinds of medicine they used and stuff like that. What do you think?"
You're a decent-looking guy, Matt, with what appears to be a steam-roller physique. By now, if you;re at all her type, she should be wondering what kind of bedside manner you have, how 'I shall please' translates in your oral technique, and what kind if sugar pills you like.
The sooner you stop disliking nonscientific types for being slightly less committed to rational consistency of thought than you are, the sooner you'll stop disliking yourself for being slightly more rational than they are, and the sooner you'll just like being with whomever you are long enough to find out whether you like them them for whom you've so far discovered them to be and what you;ve helped them discover about yourself.
in conclusion
To relieve your rapidly mounting urges for scientific expostulation, use an enthusiastic but slightly tongue-in-cheek 'Did YOU know?'... and pause a bit. Then say, 'That... there are roughly ten gazillion molecules in your little pinkie? And not one of them is named Matt Gordon?' Or something, so long as it's simple enough for them to get and doesn't involve pointless minutiae or flies laying egs inside living toads in orde to eat them alive from the inside out or something.
Make a joke of it. Very five or ten minutes. Then around the 3rd or 4th one, say, 'Did you knbow... that I'm trying very very hard to be a really likable guy?' BY then you;re going to get a nod one way or the other, but if the dialog has gone that far already, the nod will almost certainly be toward not away from you.
Finally, I emphatically disagree with this:
"Social Retardation. This one kind of speaks for itself. Because, seriously, if you had an ounce of charm, would you have majored in physics? No, you'd have been having way too much sex in college to have the time to study for that kind of shit."
While being smarter than average can create social deficits, the retardation is alrgely society's and You Are Smarter (and often more benevolently motivated) Than Them. You are the scientist. You can find answers to this problem, and even turn it into an advantage. But first, and I repeat myself: stop holding a grudge against ost people for being superficial compared to you. They can't help it that they need dumb TV shows to waste their time while all you need to waste your time is a bit of Roger Penrose written on a ketamine binge.
Bad feelings promote bad feelings. Be nice to the simple people. Treat them as well as you would a lab rat inbetween experiments liable to turn its brain into a tumor, and assume, as you do of a lab rat, that they like the nice man in the white coat who gives them grain pellets or a new way of looking at themselves.
Yes, I have a big mouth and no you didn;t ask for my advice. And my mother dresses me funny because I like it that way. ;)
P.S. Sorry for the countless typos. recent hand surgery.
P.P.S. I enjoy your blog.
This is with regard to your "sense of humour" counter to Comment #2.
That's pretty weak coming from a guy who self-professedly can't lie ... not even on a date!
Getting defensive from comments on blogs is lame. If you're into this enough to make it public and write about this kind of emo crap, then expect that a lot of readers, regular or random Google surfers (me!), are rolling their eyes in response.
ps. Dating is not better in SF. All the cute guys are gay. The non-gay cute guys ... pop their collars. It's scary.
I think it says something about your taste in men that you think popped-collar douchebags are "cute".
The state of a man's collar is immaterial when it comes to determining whether that man is hot or not!
This was FUNNY - especially how you can't lie. Thanks!
I'm no physics Ph.D but I don't lie either. I don't date because I can't stand stupid people and they can't stand being made to feel stupid. Am I arrogant? Absolutely. If I was beautiful, I might be vain, but I'm intelligent and the downside of that is often arrogance. Some day maybe I'll meet someone who is smarter than I am, and he'll make me feel like an idiot. That's the one I'll marry, if he'll have me. It's not the dating, it's who you're dating. Find a brilliant woman who will put you in your place once in a while.
As someone who is trying to finish all my schooling in the midst of a divorce this is depressing. To top it all off I'm a few years shy of forty and I'm finding that, based on similarly aged friends' experiences, the good guys at this age actually are all either already married or gay.
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