[eastbayjake]

The #1 dating horror story among women I've dated in SF is the introverted engineer who could only talk about work, engineering, or video games and otherwise required Charlie Rose levels of questioning to engage on other topics. I'm wondering if I can get funding for a Personality-as-a-Service startup in SF.

[PhasmaFelis]

I wonder how many of those engineers have horror stories about women who can only talk about <insert bland, socially approved topic here> and refuse to discuss anything interesting, like engineering or video games.

[itsybitsycoder]

Are you saying that all women want to talk about is bland socially-approved topics, or that everything other than engineering and video games is bland and socially-approved? I like talking about work and videogames sometimes but if that's all you can talk about without getting bored, it's pretty bad.

[mjevans]

I read this the other way. That the post you're replying to here was saying 'flip the table around and try to read the experience from the other side'. Are the engineers really flat and without life, or is it that the venn diagram of their mutual interests has a very small overlap and neither is particularly good at figuring out how to engage the other?

[PhasmaFelis]

I meant more what mjevans said. Sometimes two people just don't have anything in common, and that's too bad, but too often blame is placed 100% on the nerdy guy for having the "wrong" interests, when really it's nobody's fault.

Remember a while back when someone wrote an entire awful clickbait article about the horror of discovering that the guy she was on a date with played Magic: The Gathering? Not that he was unpleasantly obsessed with it, not that he couldn't talk about anything else, just that he was a frequent player.

[eastbayjake]

To clarify, an important part of these date horror stories is literally "I could not get him to talk." Like long, awkward pauses until his interlocutor asks him about work/engineering. The problem is not "having the wrong interests", it's not being able to communicate your interests to female humans unless presented with a direct question that can be answered with a factual response, like "What do you do at [Company]?"