Looking for Your Geekmate?

Geek 2 Geek

I haven’t looked around, but here’s an arti­cle about it.

Sick of being treat­ed poor­ly by hand­some — or beau­ti­ful — yup­pie scum? Sin­gle peo­ple who put their needs first? Tired of cruis­ing the big dat­ing Web sites and hook­ing up with peo­ple who look great in their pro­files but more like Qua­si­mo­do up close?

What you may need is a geek. Geeks are brainier than most, wear pock­et pen pro­tec­tors proud­ly and tape their glass­es when they break. They miss class or work when they get too absorbed in a game of Dun­geons & Drag­ons or in a “Star Trek” marathon on TV. Geeks are ten­der­heart­ed because they have not been treat­ed kind­ly by our cul­ture. They are look­ing for love.

Peo­ple like “Super Nerd Girl,” who lives 17 miles from San Fran­cis­co in an undis­closed town. She is look­ing for love, but not from a mere mor­tal. She wants a geek. To find one, she has gone online and post­ed a pro­file of her­self on www.gk2gk.com — that’s “geek to geek” — which is the lat­est entry in the niche dat­ing mar­ket. Because after all, you’ve got your Repub­li­can dat­ing sites, your scu­ba-div­ing sin­gles sites, your reli­gious affil­i­a­tion sites. Why not one for geeks?

“Super Nerd Girl” calls her­self a “Geek of Life Sci­ence and Comics,” is a stu­dent of phys­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gy and lists her favorite board game as Risk and her “geek activ­i­ties” as belong­ing to the Soci­ety for Cre­ative Anachro­nism. She writes: “I have an intense inter­est in genet­ics and biol­o­gy, and when I’m not study­ing, I like to read comics, take walks, read for leisure, study mythol­o­gy and folk­lore, play Mag­ic: the Gath­er­ing some­times. … I’m sor­ta lack­ing in the social skills, and am here because I hon­est­ly can’t fig­ure out when some­one is ask­ing me out as a friend or a roman­tic inter­est. … Yeah, that’s how social­ly inept I am.”

The good news is she’ll find kin­dred spir­its on “geek to geek.” She just won’t know what they look like. There are no pho­tos on “geek to geek” — a con­scious deci­sion on the part of founder Spence Koppel.

“About a year ago, I noticed the pro­lif­er­a­tion of dat­ing sites on the Inter­net,” says the Chica­go actu­ar­i­al (“What could be more geeky?” he notes).

“What struck me about them was that they all showed pic­tures of very attrac­tive peo­ple who were look­ing for their match,” he says. “But my research indi­cat­ed that a large per­cent­age of the peo­ple who sign up on the sites lie about them­selves — some­times even show­ing pho­ny self-pictures.”

Kop­pel also real­ized that this was not a dat­ing uni­verse that would wel­come him and his ilk.

“As a long-term geek, I real­ized that, if I were look­ing for a rela­tion­ship online, almost none of the peo­ple who reg­is­tered on these sites would like­ly inter­est me, nor would I be of inter­est to them. The ques­tions asked in the pro­file includ­ed things like ‘What is your ide­al date,’ with choic­es like ‘Can­dle­light din­ner’ and ‘Long walks on the beach.’ Peo­ple on these sites were look­ing first and fore­most for roman­tic dates — for Prince Charm­ings. But I would be look­ing first for some­one who inter­est­ed me intellectually.”

So “geek to geek” was born.

“I thought it would be refresh­ing to geeks — and admir­ers of geeks — to find a dat­ing site where they would­n’t have to be con­cerned about whether they were attrac­tive enough to join,” says Kop­pel. “Where they knew that the oth­er mem­bers did­n’t care so much about looks, either, but about com­mon inter­ests instead.”

Those com­mon inter­ests are, not sur­pris­ing­ly, geeky. Sub­scribers are asked to fill out pro­files that focus less on their ideas of roman­tic dates than on their oth­er sorts of pas­sions: com­put­ers, sci­ence, lit­er­a­ture, games, TV, movies, hob­bies. Age and loca­tion are cri­te­ria for seek­ing part­ners, but not appearance.

So far, Kop­pel’s brain­storm is bear­ing fruit quick­ly. It boasts a mod­est 5,000 mem­bers now — but has dou­bled its num­bers month­ly. The site is just get­ting start­ed in the Bay Area: five women and 18 men. But giv­en the num­ber of tech­no-geeks here, it’s sure to grow by leaps and bounds.

Indeed, there are many good rea­sons for dat­ing a geek, says Koppel.

“While I don’t know of any pub­lished sta­tis­tics, it’s been my obser­va­tion that geeks have longer, hap­pi­er and more sta­ble rela­tion­ships than the pop­u­la­tion in gen­er­al,” he says. “Looks fade, and peo­ple who seek their mates based on looks tend to con­tin­ue to try to see if they can do bet­ter in that area. If they have few oth­er inter­ests in com­mon with some­one, well, that’s the end of that rela­tion­ship. On the oth­er hand, com­mon inter­ests tend to deep­en, last a long time and lead to oth­er com­mon inter­ests as part­ners age together.”

Sounds ide­al, does­n’t it? I would imag­ine that his work on their behalf has made Kop­pel a god among geeks.

“I’ve got­ten many e‑mails of thanks for start­ing the site,” he says. “They tend to have descrip­tive screen names like ‘Tall, Dork and Hand­some,’ ‘Once You Go Mac, You Won’t Go Back,’ ‘Thick Specs’ and ‘So What If I Like Knock-Knock Jokes?’ ”

And of course, “Super Nerd Girl,” who lets the world know what she’s after.

“I don’t want a mod­el because I’m sure as Hell not one myself. I want a geek/nerd, dammit!”

Writ­ten By
Jane Ganah