When I was eighteen I packed my bags and moved across the country to a completely new state for a new lease on life. I left the house I grew up in to find my own home 1,300 miles away. When I enrolled in college at fall at a university, I struggled to find my niche. With a lifelong affinity for anime, I joined the local anime club and immediately found myself as only one of two girls in a club dominated by over forty men. That’s a unique feeling. I went from being the shy girl in high school to being the center of attention. What struck me though, was that despite my newfound status as the center of attention, I couldn’t for the life of me make the connection that I was hoping for.
Flash forward seven years.
On your average night, I’ll be working on my laptop writing content for whatever a client has requested at a particular moment, and I can usually see my husband in the room across the hall typing away on the desktop trying to finish his own workload. We both work from home, so I think we have an advantage when it comes to raising our daughter because we both bestow copious amounts of love and attention on her. I suppose in many respects I was lucky when I found my husband, because there wasn’t a lot of doubt about us. He proposed on the third date and we were married after six months together. Years later, we’re still in love and our lives are going well. But many women like me aren’t as lucky in the dating world.
This is partly because there is a distinct lack of dating advice geared towards women like me who prefer playing Mario and Little Big Planet as opposed to going out to a bar to meet men. Our general interests in life seem to dictate the kinds of men that we meet and how our interactions go. Maybe you’ve heard the expression men will sometimes say, “Why doesn’t she just go out with me since I’m a nice guy?” This isn’t a question you want to ask a second or third wave feminist. Having spent years talking to men like this before I met my husband, you begin to realize that there is the expectation that when you’re a gamer/geeky girl, etc., you should go out with a man just because they say they’re nice. But maybe you’ve noticed that we all love whom we love. It’s hard to find the right guy, and it’s not just about finding the nice guy. It’s about finding the one who makes you stay awake at night thinking about him.
To reference my husband again, the first time we met he actually annoyed me to death. He’s the kind of inquisitive guy you want to punch in the face for asking too many questions, but his genuine interest in me was refreshing. But when you’re dating, how do you get dating advice as the geek girl? Almost all of the websites out there (go ahead, search) offer dating advice to men, not women. And when questions about dating are asked or answers given, they’re most often directed at women who don’t spend months playing Mario, Little Big Planet, Halo, and Minecraft just because it was fun. Or in my case, the girl who spent years watching anime and can recite most of the episodes line for line in my head, which I used to think was impressive until I realized my husband could recite all of Frasier from memory (seriously- every single episode).
As it turns out, there are women like me who wouldn’t mind a bit more accessible information for dating. This is especially true for information that’s presented in a funny and clever way. Enter, The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, crafted by Hope Nicholson. This is a new approach to presenting women with the inside scoop of dating advice and stories on love and sex. Written, as the Kickstarter page remarks, “from both sides of the tables: from the fans who love video games, comic books, and sci-fi, and those that work behind the scenes: creators, and industry insiders,” The Secret Loves of Geek Girls actually has the potential to be the kind of book that a number of women, such as myself, can rally behind.
It’s a fairly large compilation, spanning around 250 pages of artist created material, and it features some heavy hitters in the realm of content creation. With Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s leading female authors, and slew of established names in the world of comics and writing, The Secret Loves of Geek Girls has the potential to be a smash hit. I think that if eighteen year old me had access to this kind of information, maybe I would have been a little more confident or at least less shy about my interests while dating. It can be hard to put yourself out there as a geeky girl (or at least it was close to a decade ago), and having this to read could be a game changer for a lot of girls. And guys, if you’re curious as to why you should fund this, just ask yourself if you’d like to date a geeky girl, and if so, wouldn’t you like for her to be more confident so she actually tells you about her hobbies and interests? I’d hate for you to miss your dream girl because she was too shy to ask about sex and dating advice. Trust me, it’s not easy to ask for this kind of information. Don’t believe me? My husband writes erotica and pornography for a living and I still don’t ask him for his advice. 🙂
So whether you’re a gamer girl or a guy looking for love in all the wrong places, The Secret Loves of Gamer Girls is the ideal anthology for you. Do yourself a favor and contribute to their Kickstarter campaign.
Photo credit: Gisèle Lagacé / Shouri / Hope Nicholson
