Geeks, Nice Girls & Other Hard-to-Match Singles

By Amy Owens, The Singles Coach

Based on my experience coaching singles who are searching for mates, geeks and nice girls top my list of hard-to-match singles.  The problem is not that they are not good people, but rather that their most obvious traits are unappreciated or misunderstood by other single men and women.

Geeks – please cut me some slack as I wax stereotypic here – are smart, hardworking, kind, sincere, conscientious, humble, loyal and shy.  They know a lot about a lot of stuff but not much about self-promotion.  If they did, they still wouldn’t self-promote, as they see that as “bragging”.  Geeks don’t brag; they leave bragging to others.  Geeks just do what they do – and they do what they do very well – and let their work speak for itself.  If someone notices, fine.  If not, oh well.

Geeks work as engineers, computer programmers, system analysts, accountants, research scientists, statisticians, physicists, and mathematicians. For the most part, they work alone and out of public view.  The rest of us don’t see them do their work, but we benefit from their labors.
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Geeks often go unnoticed by women until they are in their 30’s, 40’s and even 50’s.  My older son, a geek, has observed that younger women completely overlook geeks until they grow tired of being mistreated by the socially savvy men in suits who first catch their eye.  He wishes women would look at geeks and see the true potential they possess as human beings, dates and mates and give them a chance.
 
As for nice girls – smart, educated, accomplished women – it’s their evident high intelligence, power and income that threaten many men. The smarter and more accomplished a woman is or is perceived to be, the more difficult it will be for her to find a mate. Only men who have these attributes themselves and who are also comfortable and confident in having them will find these characteristics attractive in a woman, thus limiting the pool of potential mates for women of this ilk.

​I don’t suggest that smart and accomplished women searching for mates try to dumb-down.  Rather than trying to hide their light under a basket, I suggest that these women aim higher, raising the bar on the type of man they are looking for. The pool of men may be smaller, but each woman is only looking to find one man. ​

What about pairing geeks with nice girls?  It works like a charm!  Nice girls like geeks because, above all, they are nice guys.  Geeks, like nice girls, are typically highly educated professionals who have steady employment and a 401K.  Geeks are not threatened by a woman’s intelligence.  On the contrary.  A geek is proud to say that his girl is the smartest woman he knows.  The best part of this pairing is that once they’re married, each of them is absolutely convinced that they married up. This is exactly what happened when my geek son married a nice girl.