#NerdsUnite: I met my husband on @PlentyOfFish (We are women, & we can buy a TV!)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Jessica. She and I met through this loverly site, and by her reaching out to me asking if she could write for us. Really rad chickie, she provided a lot of insight into my childhood for me (something you don't get every day from someone!!) - andddddd she has quite the life story. Like did you know she moved cross country for love? ORRRR that she found out her ex cheated on her by reading it on Facebook? ANNNNDDDD she even married a guy she met off of Plenty of Fish! Yep, true story! This is life as told through her eyes, and through the keyword of the nerd. HIT IT JESSICA!!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @ItsJessWeaver
My friend Christy is a pretty cool chick. She’s single. She was recently dating this dude who seemed awesome. He said a lot of things about how much he liked her, how sad he’d be if they broke up—he even asked her to make it official by letting him call her his girlfriend. And suddenly, pretty much out of the blue, he stopped texting her and blocked her on Facebook. Being the girls we are, we went over the last few days with a fine-toothed comb, looking for clues, but try as we might, we couldn’t find anything—even something she might have done to scare him off. It was literally “I think I have the flu” via text, to NOTHING.
Naturally, she is not feeling all that awesome and is looking for ways to not feel super alone in her house. She just recently moved in and set up cable, but didn’t have a TV yet. She was going to take Captain Coward Flu-Boy with her to pick the right TV, but since he got so sick and forgot they were together, she needed to put Plan B in motion. Well, she needed a TV. If you’re going to drown out the ticking of your biological clock, a white noise machine and your pet cat’s meows are not going to cut it.
I decided to call my husband, since he has this cool entertainment system with a giant TV, and is a gamer, and seems to care a lot about electronics. He’s a guy. All guys know stuff about TVs. He had plans to pick up some tools for his job, so he couldn’t come help us pick out a TV after work. Well, crap. Who were we to rely on for sound home theater advice, if not him, or some other well-qualified expert? And by well-qualified, I mean has a penis. Yep. I realized something. I assumed my husband knew something about TVs, but I also just wanted him to be there. For some reason, I wanted to have a man a long for the buying of this TV, but I couldn’t think of any solid reason why. I mean, I don’t have a penis, but I could probably still help my friend pick out a TV. The fact that she still didn’t have a TV after all this time because she’d been waiting on Sir Silent Treatment to take her shopping was reason enough for us both to square our shoulders, march in to Best Buy, and prove that we could buy things for ourselves.
As we walked around Best Buy, we both related stories of how we’d purchased cars with a man by our side, making recommendations and providing a buffer between us and the buying experience. Earlier that day, I’d heard two women tell separate stories of how sales people had treated them as if they rocks in their head, seemingly just because of their gender. One of the sales people actually looked surprised said, “Wow, that was pretty smart of you to check with Toyota,” when she’d stated that the work done on her car by the company was not up to factory standards. The first car-buying advice I ever got was “bring a man with you, or you’ll get taken advantage of.” This advice was from a woman—a women who was actually her own husband’s boss— and she was no pushover. So, tell me—why do we put up with this? Why do we buy into it?
I can strike a good deal, all by myself, on a car, or a TV. Yes, salesmen may roll their eyes at a woman alone shopping for something he assumes she knows nothing about, but that’s no reason for me to give in and agree with him by dragging a man along to make the buying decision for me. Tim told me he really didn’t know anything about TVs—nothing more than I did. So what would it have accomplished to have him along, except for him to look pretty (which he does so well)? Nothing. We would have bought a TV. Probably the same one we ended up picking out. Because we did go into Best Buy. We compared the models, the prices, the features, and the picture quality. We asked about the plasma, the difference between HD, 3D and regular TV, the advantages of mounting on the wall versus using the stand…we even compared prices using our smart phones. We talked through it, and decided which one was the best TV for Christy and her tiny little house, and her crazy cat, and she bought it.
We even carried it out ourselves. Because we can. If we can’t remember that, then who will?
One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man. --Marlo Thomas
#thatisall
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