An Ethical Dilemma:

Friend A points out that he really likes Friend B and would really like to get to know Friend B better, and since Your Humble Servant seems to spend some appreciable amount of time with Friend B, asks Your Humble Servant to lend a hand or other appendages toward sweetening Friend B in that direction.

Friend B, when the subject of Friend A comes up in conversation, confides that while he's "all right" as a friend, she doesn't want anything to do with him beyond that. But, being a nice person, she also doesn't want to tell Friend A this.

This illustrates a phenomenon I am quite familiar with, being somewhat of a participant in it myself -- what I refer to as the "Geeks Make Great Sisters" Syndrome. In essence, it refers to us poor slobs who others perpetually consider to be great friends -- "I love you like a sister!" or "I love you like a brother!" -- which due to the subconscious squick factor involving some bizarre form of assumed incest ensures that the slob in question is instantly and forevermore relegated to the "not only no but hell no" pile.

See, people go on and on about how geeks are social misfits, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're social misfits because no one wants anything to do with us. Everybody wants brainless fashion models. And apparently only brainless fashion models are assumed to have a fully functioning endocrine system. Geeks are not asexual. We'd quite like a bit of nookie now and again ourselves. People laugh and make fun of geeks who get fixated on characters in video games and T'Pol or Chianna ... but hell, who else are we gonna chase? Real-world, real-time girls want nothing to do with us.

In point of fact, statistically speaking, fashion models and other freaks of nature are comparatively rare. Your best bet for romantic success is to go for the middle fifty percentile of the bell curve. Take it from me, girls, there's a hell of a lot of really sweet, terribly nice, frightfully intelligent men out there if you eliminate good looks from your parameters. Good looks fade. Funny and intelligent don't. The whole living in your parents' basement thing is so 1980's. These days the savvy geek pulls down 60K a year in IT.

'Course, I guess most women are too vain to put up with being a game widow. If you've gotta have a guy's undivided attention all the time you need to get a life.


Then there's complete anomalies like me who don't fit any known category, so it's not hard to see why I'm SOL on the romance front. I guess that's why I'm considered a sort of neutral negotiator. Which begs the question, why do these people think I know anything about all this schtick? A failed marriage and two disastrous affairs on the far side of an 8 1/2 year celibacy streak does NOT make me an expert on Matters Romantic. Most people consider "celibate bisexual" to be a contradiction in terms. Hello, let me introduce myself, I'm the Living Contradiction!


Sheesh.