import geek

Okay, I've given you three weeks to get a girl, and even gave you a guide extolling your virtues that you could hand out. Everyone have a girl by now?

Good.

There's one problem, though. Some of those ladies you've procured? They're not geeks. They're not even close. They go to the mall to shop rather than NewEgg, like restaurants where you get beaten up if you don't wear a tie (wait, those aren't just for funerals?), and like chicklit and movies that make them cry and you die a little inside.

Crap.

Do not fear, however! There is hope! You can make that woman a geek!

Start off slow

You can't dunk a woman into a vat of geekness and expect her to come out debating the differences between Perl and Python and how you could be overclock your machine. She will come out like a cat you've dunked in cold bathwater. It will only be amusing for the person watching it on YouTube later.

So you have to start her off slow, building her tolerance (and eventually fostering a love) for what you like. (No guarantees about the overclocking thing, though)

Movies

Movies are a great place to start. There's some awesome movies out there that geeks love, and yet are super friendly to non-geek women. Hell, some of them are practically date movies! Start off with Labyrinth or Princess Bride, or Spaceballs if she likes humor. From those, you can start nudging her towards LOTR trilogy or the original Star Wars movies.

Warning: show her the newest Star Wars trilogy, and you will ruin all your efforts to convert her. Either she'll hate them and think the rest of the genre is like those abominations, or she'll love them, and we'll be obliged to exile her to Siberia.

TV

There's nothing more a geek likes more than a good series. You can draw lines between us, based on what series we like the most. Trek? BSG? Doctor Who? Bab 5?

You can't just start your new flame with Deep Space Nine or Battlestar Galactica, though. All that heavy death and complex background? Sure-fire turn off. For this, I point to one of the least liked Star Trek Series there is: Voyager.

Yeah, it was pretty lame most of the time, but look at the elements: very little back story, tons of romance, goofy story lines, and a female commander with a hot second-in-command. Get her hooked, then move her on to the more hardcore stuff.

Games

While the number of women who game are growing, their numbers are still not so high that you may have been able to snag a woman who likes video games. Many probably had a NES or SNES growing up, but eschewed it as the stuff of youth once they started eying boys.

Sigh. Had they only known the aphrodisiac qualities of a woman who can rattle off the lives cheat to Contra.

At any rate, you want to reintroduce (or introduce, if she was terribly sheltered) her to gaming slowly. Tossing a 100+ hour RPG or a blood soaked shooter isn't going to win her over. Throwing a 360 controller at her with (/me thinks) two directional joysticks, one directional pad, four buttons, two alternate buttons, a power button and four triggers is going to annoy her. A computer game where you have to reference a keyboard schematic in order to play is going to annoy anyone. The best machine to get her into the game: the Nintendo DS. One directional pad. Four buttons. Two triggers you almost never use. And about any game you'd ever want to play.

And it totally fits in your purse. \o/

I have seen people who swore they would never game pick up a DS and play a few rounds of Super Mario or Sudoku. I talk to women on the train all the time who demanded their own DS after seeing their boyfriend's and picking it up out of boredom. Some just do the usual puzzle games, but I know a few that have moved onto rescuing the princess and slaying the zombie hordes.

Ah, the rituals of courtship

When courting, throw in things that show how being a geek is an advantage, rather than something to overcome or hide.

Step one: Cook.

Don't give me that look. You are smart. You can make spiraling towers of ones and zeros bend the reality within a computer to your will. You know languages by the handful, can rattle off the specs of a computer you had when you were eleven, and use text editors that require manuals. You can make your girl a dinner.

The trick is showing her how your way of cooking dinner is superior to the general way of cooking (which involves using mom's cookbooks that she no longer wanted). Geek cooking is totally different. It's finicky yet creative. Alton Brown is a geek. He believes in putting some effort out there to make your dish wonderful, and that precision is worth the attention.

There's even a site dedicated to cooking like an engineer. How better to show that being a bit of a geek is quite useful?

There's also the other stuff of courtship. Put your smarts to use to do other things, like make her cool things. My favorite geek story comes from Three Panel Soul, wherein he wrote a cute game in order to propose to his then girlfriend.

She accepted ;) A testament that you can seal the deal with enough cute geekery.