I dated a #dumb guy
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @JenSquard
Well, let’s be real, I’ve dated a lot of dumb guys, but there is one that really stands out. And I don’t mean like, he’s a boy, he’s dumb....I mean like straight up really not smart. At all. 
I’m going to call him Fernando, mostly because that’s the ABBA song that’s playing right now. So Fernando....we went to school together since I moved here in middle school, but I never paid a ton of attention to him. He was a redneck, like wayyyy redneck. Cowboy pants, work boots, major swagger even when he was 11, the whole thing. Not a bad looking person, there was potential there.
In high school I was about the farthest thing from a redneck. I have often been called a hippy, which has always annoyed me for some reason. I’m not really a hippy...I’m a bleeding heart. I get a total boner for nature, and always have. I’ve wanted to work with animals since I was wee, I don’t hunt, blah blah. Not hunting has always been a source of strain in this town. EVERYONE hunts. That adorable tiny popcorn fart of a girl with long eyelashes and heels - you can bet your ass she goes deer hunting with her daddy every fall. Too weird for me. I’ve always been a little out there, a free spirit, and gone with whatever I like. Always. I wore crazy things in high school because I could pull them off. I was friends with most people, but not one of the popular kids or outcasts. And I was a bit of a fox so I got away with a lot.
Fernando was close to the exact opposite of me. He struggled in all of his classes. He had a group of redneck friends that chewed tobacco, got into fights for no reason, but treated old people with respect. He was good at sports, and incredibly funny, but mostly stayed out of the way. We were friends, and I hung out with that group as much as I hung out with any other group. They bought me breakfast in the town over whenever I would ditch class, so, hey, I thought they were awesome.
My first three years of high school were crazy. My relationship with my dad was a mess, so I did everything I could to defy him. I drank, I partied on school nights, I had sex, all of it. I lived it up in a pretty major way. After I left my dad’s house my junior year, things settled down a bit. My mom gave me freedom so I no longer needed to push my limits. I had a class with Fernando...well, woodshop, so not really....and I started noticing things about him that I was attracted to. Dumb things, like the way he saw the world, and the way he spoke to people. Not necessarily attractive qualities, but things I was drawn to. We started dating, and that way weirded everyone in the school out. It was a terrible matching and didn’t make sense on any level at all.
But he really wasn’t smart. He spelled 9 out of 10 words wrong. One day we were talking about bugs, and I mentioned how they were strange little animals. He told me in no uncertain terms that bugs were NOT animals. They were bugs. In his mind they were two very different things. I asked if he thought trees were plants. They aren’t, apparently. These are things that I have known since I was tiny...and here is a grown man that refuses to accept it. Mind blowing, I swear to you, I didn’t even know how to process that. That was nothing new, though, he saw the world in a very different, very masculine, and very juvenile way. He had zero nerd in him. ZERO. He was passionate about nearly nothing. He didn’t understand why I cried and cried when I got to hold hands with a monkey. Having something that you feel that strongly about made you weak, in his eyes at least.
Dating Fernando got me under control. I no longer partied until I got alcohol poisoning. I stopped using my body to get attention, and I focused on my future. I actually learned in college, and if it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have met the turd bird that would become my husband. But if it hadn’t have been for dating such an incredibly unintelligent and dull person, I would never have learned the value of fellow nerds, stimulating conversation, and someone that shares your interests and passions.
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