[awakened]

“The sad thing about guys who exhibit these brogrammer qualities is they seem to fall short of greatness in both worlds,” said Parish. “They’re not purely macho or purely geeky, they’re somewhat pretenders in both...”

Part of the problem is that women like this want a man who looks like Tarzan, is rich, respected and powerful but who can also change the oil in the car, fix the plumbing, mow the lawn, fight Brock Lesnar for her honor (and win) and make her laugh on command.

I tell my wife that she should have married a dozen guys. Yeah, I do so much stuff that I don't do anything really well. Thanks for noticing and calling me a pretender. I'm just an average guy like all the rest.

Edit: Happily married for 15 years. My wife and I joke about this. She understands and has settled for me ;)

[jsolson]

I don't share that takeaway from the article. What I took away was:

1) She's looking for someone who has confidence in a well formed personality all their own.

2) That personality is not defined by what they do for work.

3) Part of that personality includes taking an interest in the lives and personalities of other people, particularly in the context of a one-on-one social situation who's entire purpose is (arguably) to get to know one another.

Sure, I'm certain that if all of the traits you outline came by in one package they'd happily take it, but the complaint seemed to be that she's encountering men who, having any of those qualities, assume that's like having all of them and don't bother to develop the rest of the bits that make us human and tolerable to fill in the gaps.

My reasoning behind this takeaway is that I spend a fair amount of time hanging out in (apparently) the same neighborhood and same bars that she does, and I find a lot of the folks who aren't interested in talking about anything other than what they do for work similarly insufferable. That said, I'm a guy. I work in tech. In Seattle. For Google. After having gotten tired of Amazon. I routinely catch myself being part of the problem (although not the dating problem as I haven't been single in over ten years).

[chrismcb]

Sure, a lot of women want that "tall dark and handsome" guy with lots of money. But the author even mentioned some of the people she went with were nice looking, but either they were egotistical, or they were boring. And yeah a lot of tech guys are boring.

I once had an officemate, did decently in the finance department, was ok looking, but... We were both contracting, I was taking the summer off to travel Europe. He... well he wished he could take a cruise or something, but ended up sitting in his apartment for several months until the next contract came along.