[sclug] OT: Social question

[Neil Brown]

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I've had absolutely no problem making female friends - most of my
friends are female, I'd guess - but, finding someone I wanted as a
girlfriend was much harder. However, since Newbury is a small place, and
I wanted to avoid going down the line of a relationship with anyone in
the same company, my options were limited... I make a lot of friends
online, and often meet up with people who I first met online (SCLUG
being an example), and, for me, it's this combination which has worked
best- a chance to really chat to people and find out about them, prior
to meeting them.

As it happened, I met up with a girl, having chatted and got on well
online, and we came away from the date each thinking "Phew-  I won't
have to see her again" - online / at-a-distance impressions can be wrong.

Or, perhaps not, since, having continued to chat to each other online
afterwards, we realised that we really did get on with each other, and
that the first date had just not worked out... We met up again,
immediately clicked that time, and we're still together, and very
happily so.

Local is better, though - the previous attempt (met through a Linux
forum!) was in the US, and the first meeting was in Canada. That was
less successful, although, I did have a great few days in Toronto, even
if it was seeing sights on my own during the more fraught patches. I did
manage to fix all the issues on her netbook, though, so, not a complete
failure!

hth




Neil






John Stumbles wrote:
> ed wrote:
> 
>> Is this something that other computer professionals find to be
>> problematic given the nature of IT work?
> 
> Can't help thinking of a character in one of David Lodge's novels ("Nice
> Work", maybe?). She's a thirty-something academic in a provincial
> university who's single and laments that all the men she meets are
> either "married, gay or scientists" :-) (It was written before IT was
> big and I suspect Lodge would have picked on IT people if he'd written
> it now.)
> 
> 
> Personally I find that women I like and get on with even on the phone (I
> don't do online social networking) I don't necessarily like face to
> face. To some extent maybe that's the tyranny of attractiveness (heard a
> sad story about a blind guy who met a really nice girl and started going
> out with her, until a mate of his remarked that she looked a bit of a
> dog, and he dropped her). But he fact is that you need to like a person
> in all respects that matter to you if you're going to have an intimate
> relationship with them and visual aspects do matter, as well as other
> personality factors. Not just looks of course: the way a person moves
> conveys perhaps more than what you'd get from a photo.
> 
> So, what others have said about getting out and doing social stuff is
> right, I think.
> 
> 
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