I Flirt Like A Nerd

I recently had a flirtation with a guy whereby we debated the merits of using Dictionary.com versus the actual hard copy, old school, book version of the dictionary. And I realized, with some degree of alarm, that this felt familiar. That this—this courting by way of words—was not a one-time thing. It was a recurring thing. It was my thing. The Frisky: Our Unusual Flirting Techniques

Thinking back, I remembered a past relationship I had with a fellow writer, and how it began with us exchanging flirtatious emails that centered around … books. And words. Big, big words. His emails were filled with huge words that I'd have to look up in the dictionary, or on Dictionary.com, and I'd check the definitions of my own big words that I wanted to pepper in the emails I sent to him. Our emails went on into the midnight hours, and though they were about literary topics and read like personal essays, I felt a surge of sexuality under the surface and between the lines. Many mornings I woke up and rushed to my computer, still in my pajamas and clutching a hot mug of tea, my stomach doing kamikaze dive bombs of anticipation as my computer booted up, my pulse quickening and my heart racing as I saw his emboldened name in my inbox, my eyes hungrily darting across his big, throbbing words.

During our email correspondence, or as a result of it, I felt like my brain was expanding daily, constantly filled with swirling words and sentences and carefully crafted paragraphs that he sent to me or that I was planning to send to him. I felt alive and on fire and filled with desire, fueled by these words, as books and writing and passion crashed together all at once in him. One night I had a dream that I was lying pressed up against him on a bed overflowing with books, both of us naked, him reading classic literature to me before we made rapturous love, a tangle of sweaty limbs and cool, crisp pages intertwined.

But there have been more men subjected to my nerdy ways, and not just super-intellectual bookish writer men. There was a man who chain-smoked Marlboro Reds and had a deep, gravelly smoker's voice and beautiful lines etched into his face from his dark and checkered past, wore an authentically tattered leather jacket, and lifted heavy things, often. He didn't have a nerdy bone in his body. That is, until I started talking thesaurus to him as I straddled him, both of us only partially clothed. I breathlessly asked him if he preferred using the thesaurus in book version or its counterpart in the Microsoft Word Tools dropdown menu. And he … responded. We went back and forth with …synonyms. Right before we made out. The Frisky: A Guide To Flirting 2.0

This was foreplay. For a nerdy Type A English Major honors student, this was my dirty talk.

And going further back to my nerdy flirting roots, almost 10 years ago, there was the guy in the band I used to see play every Monday night. And each week I'd bound up to the stage after the show and greet him with a hug and a new big word of the week, and he’d reply with a word of his own. He wore a leather jacket. He played the guitar. He was in a band for God's sake, and look what I did to him!