A Nerd's Guide to Dating

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So I feel I should start by explaining that Brij and I set each other 33 challenges each, and one of the ones he set me was to write a blog about a recent date.

As challenges go it’s a good one, since it’s not something I would usually write about.

People somewhere on the autistic spectrum generally don’t write about social stuff; that’s precisely what places them on the spectrum – that they don’t have strong reactions to social things, and as a consequence they don’t ‘see’ social data. Instead, they feel strongly about other things – like routine, or trains – or in my case the nature of life. So it’s not that I am embarrassed to talk about dating experiences – quite the contrary – it’s just that I don’t remember them in much detail. The bits I tend to remember are the bits that meant something important. I just have the fragments that struck me as significant.

And whilst this means my blogs sound kind of nerdy and dispassionate to many people – I write with passion about things like learning, psychology and philosophy because I feel these things intensely – just as normal people feel intensely about social stuff, such as how many ‘likes’ their Instagram selfies got. So we each think the other is a little odd, and that’s just fine.

And I guess this is why Nietzsche’s opening gambit in Beyond Good and Evil – that philosophers are just people who don’t know how to seduce the opposite sex – has always bugged me. It’s a damning deconstruction: that somehow men's resentments bubble up in their philosophy. Maybe they do.

In the movie a ‘A beautiful mind’ the arch-mathematician, John, goes on a picnic with his girlfriend and at some point says “I don’t know exactly what I’m required to say in order for me to have intercourse with you, but could we assume I said all that?” – and that always struck me as a neat articulation of the problem – that a person might have just the same, perhaps even greater, desire for someone else – but two left feet when it comes to the dance that you’re supposed to do.

So I’m doing it now: talking about what things mean – not through avoidance – but because that’s how I experience the world. Most people think about meaning in reflective moments- or when things go badly wrong. I long for a break from it. It’s like being trapped in the Sahara desert and desperately looking for shade.

Talking to people I realise I have probably had more relationships and dates than most people. There’s a whole jumble of reflections and theories about why – but let’s not go into that.

One person I got to know online. We chatted back and forth, and we seemed pretty well-matched in terms of attractiveness and professional accomplishments. I much prefer chatting via text to face-to-face; they are completely different things – one is chess the other is tennis. Social interaction is all instinct, typing is mainly thought.

So we met for a date at a posh Italian restaurant. She arrived and it was clear that she wasn’t the person in her pictures. Or at least it was her in the pictures but a much younger, slimmer version of her.

Sigh. So part of you says this shouldn’t matter. But we are elephants and riders; animals with a small amount of steerage sitting on the top.

And it struck me that dating – and ageing – are really difficult for women. Societally a lot of emphasis is placed on how you look – and if your sense of who you are is built on this, you can’t really let go of identifying with the best you ever looked without risking complete collapse of your self-esteem. So, to her, she was still the girl in those pictures. Fixated in those pictures. And I wasn’t about to shatter that illusion. In fact, perhaps I was there to validate it. In any case my view is that when you chose to spend time with someone – date or not – you are there to make that time amazing for them.

So how does a person with limited social skills make time amazing for someone else? It turns out it’s not that difficult. What you don’t do is talk about the things that you care about: about psychology, or philosophy, or learning, or cultural shifts – you talk about them. And though this doesn’t come naturally, you can train yourself to be curious – to ask question, after question, after question. Normal people really, really love to talk about themselves.

Is that disingenuous? I don’t know. Is it wrong to find ways to fit in?

You may have thought: why not simply find someone with similar interests? But there’s a catch – genetics. At some instinctive level genetics tries to balance the equation through the mysterious process of ‘attraction’. Introverts crave extroverts and vice-versa - ‘Opposites attract’. And, frankly, I don’t need more of the same - it's poisonous to me. Thinking about philosophy and psychology is not a pastime for me – it drains me like an illness. I need a break. Someone to drag me back from the brink and push me in another direction. Imagine you're a comedian and during a date the other person says 'go on then - tell me some jokes!'.

So we had a good time. She told me about a terrible online dating experience she had had where she had to escape from the restaurant via a bathroom window and run for her life, and then the jilted lover had texted her relentlessly thereafter. And on the one hand I thought that probably women have a pretty horrible time with men on the dating scene (I had heard other, worse, stories) and on the other I wondered if she was telling me this story to inflate her sense of worth. Along similar lines I had noticed other women in the restaurant looking at me - and that she had noticed this and she seemed to like this. All these games strike me as a bit ridiculous – but now I can spot some of them. I think it’s odd to want someone only because other people want them, but then we can’t control the way we are wired. We’re monkeys who dream we are gods.

Anyway, the evening was perfect, I drove her home, we kissed and then (maybe the next day) I wrote to say I didn’t think that, though I had enjoyed her company, we were right for each other (or something like that – I remember thinking quite hard about the best way to put things so as not to hurt her feelings). And then she wrote back a long, bitter, angry rant about how I had led her down a path and deceived her - and it was just awful. 

It's tempting to think that people can just 'be themselves' but really there is no such thing: we are creatures that see ourselves through others' eyes, and simultaneously project our expectations onto others as if they were a blank canvas. Each of us brings their own personal struggles into every situation: for some people their sense of self-esteem in on the line in every social interaction, and I can’t imagine what it is like to be that vulnerable and hurt on a daily basis. I guess I am very lucky.

And that experience – and several others – made me think that online dating is a pretty rubbish way to find a good match, since what you get of people online rarely says very much about how you feel about them in person - and that you generally discover in the first few minutes when you meet.

32 challenges to go.