When Nerds Attempt to Hook Up

I know several people who met their significant others at a work-related conference. I suppose this makes sense, given that the conditions are ideal for a hook-up. You're at a hotel already. You get to meet people with similar interests as you do, and everyone is dressed up and looking nice. And after or in between all the conferencing stuff, every social and networking occasion involves alcohol. And you're there for only a few days, so you'd might as well have a little fun while you're working.

However, in regards to academic conferences, which are the only conferences I've been to, I find it hard to believe that much hooking up happens. Quite frankly, I rarely see anyone remotely fuckable at academic conferences. Professors are largely former speech and debate geeks and academic decathletes (no joke), so one can only imagine what kind of a meat market academic conferences might be.

At a recent conference I attended, I did manage to meet someone with hook-up potential. He wasn't a professor or a graduate student, but worked as a program coordinator at an institution that works in historical preservation. I'll just refer to him as Sriracha. Because I only remember that his name started with an S. And, well, because he was hot. Anyway, I met Sriracha with a group of graduate students who were having dinner and drinks at the end of the first day of the conference. As the night progressed, we got drunk, danced, flirted, and eventually found ourselves back at the hotel.

Now, I'm not one to do the one-night-stand thing, even in my drunkest and flirtiest state. So I was pretty careful about setting my boundaries and keeping things light. Sriracha, however, definitely wanted sex. A part of me was definitely tempted to throw caution to the wind and sleep with the guy. But then, the dude suddenly transformed into a pubescent boy. After going in for a kiss, he started talking like Screech from Saved By the Bell and exclaimed, "Woah, what happened there?" And then he told me he wanted to see my "boobies, " after which I burst out laughing and told him I had to call it a night. Any desire on my part to hook-up fizzled. I didn't see the guy again for the rest of the conference.

Anyway, because the academic world is absurdly small, it turns out that Sriracha knows a good friend of mine, who worked at the same institution he works for. She was quite shocked when I told her about our little almost-hook-up, because the dude is engaged to be married. And apparently, his fiancee is absolutely gorgeous. My friend is also very disappointed the fact that Sriracha would cheat on his fiancee, because he seems to be such a decent, intelligent, put-together guy.

I suppose I should be insulted by the fact that this guy was putting me in the position of Bombshell McGee, Divine Brown, or the however many women Tiger Woods managed to have affairs with. But mostly I just think the whole scenario is absurd. I'll bet Sriracha regularly has one night stands with women whenever he goes to conferences. Had he not chosen to make me his target, I'm sure he would have found someone else that night. He may have had a different woman each night he was at the conference. I think this might be the case for a lot of men in academia, especially in the humanities, where men are the distinct minority. Sriracha, who's attractive, but really is only a normal-looking dude in the normal world, must easily catch the attention of academic women, who either don't get to meet very many men at all or only meet friggin' weird and awkward men. (Again, academics really are just a bunch of nerds.) I've seen it time and again-- Guys who are really unexceptional-looking or even downright ugly getting way more ass than one would think they'd be able to get, or snagging women way out of their league and then cheating on them. I really don't get this behavior.

Jerks exist everywhere in and in all forms, of course. But put a guy in an environment where he feels entitled to be greedy, even the biggest nerd can be a playboy.