When Geek Meets Geek

The first purchase my husband and I ever made together was while we were dating. It was an old paperback copy of Tolkien's The Hobbit along with the corresponding set of The Lord of the Rings. We each had a fondness for Tolkien – his lifelong, and mine less than a year old. We had each "grown up" on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But where I enjoyed, or rather obsessed, over a good book, he enjoyed board games. Where I spent my teen years in the world of Austen, he spent his in the realm of Dungeons and Dragons. While I used the computer to pen a rather bad horror story, he broke his to see if he could fix it. When we fell in love, we recognized and embraced each other's geeky habits. The fact that we each had our own peculiarities made it that much easier to come together.

Over the years our tastes and interests have merged somewhat, as we each found ways to indulge the other. I held him in a headlock to watch Cinderella II, while he took me to see Sin City. Both events are still used as ammunition by each of us. I lured him to the literary world with such books as Lectures on the Theory of Games by Harold Kuhn, and How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies. He tempted me with board games such as The Lord of the Rings Risk, and Trivial Pursuit Book Lover's Edition, though admittedly nobody will play Trivial Pursuit with me. In fact it was because he read GeekDad, that I found and started writing for GeekMom. Some days I will read GeekDad and tell him of an article he should read, some days he gets something from GeekMom. Both routes lead us to some excellent conversation, in which we sometimes agree!

Sharing our passions with each other and with our children is important to my husband and me. So when my son's grandmother bought him a chair from Pottery Barn, his name was embroidered alongside R2-D2. When picking out board books, we placed Good Night, Gorilla along with My First Batman. My oldest son already has an almost complete collection of vintage Star Wars figures, that he will receive when he stops pulling the heads off of his current batch of Stormtroopers. My youngest son has a T-shirt that says "Future Mr. Darcy."

We each still have our individual interests. I will never play Halo or Portal with him; he will never join my book club. But each of us will encourage our sons to share in both, at the right age, of course. Who do you share your geek pride with?