Geek Valentine's: Serious discussions for geek couples

2011-02-14T16:21:53+00:00

Those of you who know me well may expect that if I acknowledge Valentine’s Day at all, I usually mark it as Oregon Statehood Day or extol its origins in the celebration of familial and platonic love before its absorption by the romance cult. So I’m going to shock you: this is an actual romance-related blog post to mark Valentine’s Day.

Good communication is key to any lasting relationship, romantic or otherwise, and there are certain important conversations that the experts suggest people have before entering upon romantic commitments. But those experts are usually not geeks, so they overlook all sorts of situations that are specific to the geek lifestyle (or to the lifestyle geeks wish they had.) So, I have taken it upon myself to lay out some discussion topics. These are not small questions like who drives the starship: they touch on religion, ethics, life, death, and all that sort of thing. It’s important to settle such points if you want to be celebrating the tenth anniversary of your victory against the forces of evil together, instead of going on adventures all by yourself and wondering where your zippy banter has got to.

What is my authority to designate discussion topics for you and your co-protagonist? My authority is that I have a blog and you are reading it.

10 Serious discussions for geek couples

10. Am I free to date if you die? It’s just good to get this out of the way: how long should you wait to make sure your old honey isn’t going to be revived, or resurrected by magic, or regrown by sinister corporations?

9. Will you kill me if I am facehugged, bitten by a zombie, et c.? If it comes to that, your partner should do you both. If you’re not willing to even get someone else to stake my vampirized corpse, cut my head off and fill my mouth with garlic, what kind of commitment can you offer me?

8. Do we convert if we witness a miracle? If the Holy Grail cures your dad’s gut wound, do you consider yourself illuminated, or just move on to the next thing?

7. Do we welcome our alien overlords? For instance, I’m pro-cephalopod overlord, but I’m not too keen on reptilians.

6. Are we going to get cyber implants? If so, how many? If flashing lights and servos are a dealbreaker for your co-protagonist, it’s best to know now.

5. Are AIs and manufactured sentients deserving of human rights? Social justice, baby.

4. Is being body-switched with your worst enemy grounds for a break-up? For the record, Callisto is very pretty. If you have to switch bodies with an evil murderer, you could do worse.

3. Does the holodeck count as cheating? However you come down on the general rule, it’s best to specify that holodeck-snogging people you actually know is creepy as hell, as well as potentially more relationship-endangering.

2. Are we raising the kids Orthodox Jedi or Reform? Oh, sure, some of us geeks are atheists and so forth, but you know if you raise Force-sensitive kids without any religious training, they’re much more susceptible to Sith interference.

1. Are we in this for loot, or XP? Sure, you think this is an abstract question, but when you’re bickering over whether your co-protagonist should take the dream job or the six figures, or whether to return the culturally significant artifact to the village or fence it, you’ll realize I was right.

Reluctant romantics

2010-11-27T15:25:15+00:00

At the beginning of the “Much Ado About Nothing” production in the BBC’s Shakespeare Retold, the credits roll over events several years before the action of the play. Beatrice is preparing for a big date; Benedick is preparing…to skip town for a big job.

Now, some of you may realize this isn’t countertextual: it’s a spinning out of one line:

DON PEDRO: Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of
Signior Benedick.

BEATRICE: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave
him use for it, a double heart for his single one:
marry, once before he won it of me with false dice,
therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.

I could go on at some length about the casting of this production — Damian Lewis as Benedick, be still my heart; and Sarah Parish, the pretty, witty Beatrice with the motile face. But I’m here to talk about the introduction and one shot in particular where Beatrice scatters red rose petals over her bed, then looks at them, goes off screen, and comes back with a dustbuster to remove them. With her expressive face, you see the whole thought process play out.

I love this moment. It crystallizes something very important: Beatrice is a reluctant romantic. She is a romantic, or she never would have thought of the petals: but once deployed they strike her as too much, too obvious, too vulnerable, too earnest. Too romantic.

I can sympathize. I don’t know what scholar put forward the idea of the romance cult, but I first read about it in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Basically, the idea is that as the power of the Church has declined in post-Medieval Europe (and the European-inflected West) the place of Christianity has been supplied by worldly romance. Sure, the Western world is still chock-full of Christians, but Christianity can no longer safely be assumed to be a universal constant. Stories told in the Renaissance and later depend on different universal truths and aspirations, a different transcendant happiness: romantic love. Love, moreover, that transforms and elevates, that is itself a destiny and purpose. True Love with One person, Forever.

It’s natural, perhaps, that this world order should have its cynics, just as the religious one did. But most of us — not all, I note — do crave companionship, and the idea of a lasting partnership that will fix us and save us from ourselves has been programmed in from an early age. Even those of us who believe more in density than in destiny often have a yearning heart.

And so, for us, there are the reluctant romantics, the bickering lovers, the banterers and sarcastics. Beatrices and Benedicks, Hans and Leias: characters who are strong and self-reliant, resistant perhaps to the vulnerability of love or belief in it, characters who demonstrate with every barbed word and cynical protest that they will not go gently into the sunset. It’s become an overused device itself, but done right, it still enchants. In the process of convincing their doubting hearts, they convince ours too.

Posts tagged with "romance" - Faerye Net

Geek Valentine's: Serious discussions for geek couples

Reluctant romantics