
Should you date a mathematician? - dscpls
http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2011/03/should-you-date-a-mathematician/
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wanda

      Their wives complain that their husbands didn’t
      notice that the furniture was repossessed or
      that their old cat died and was replaced by a
      dog. My third husband was like that. At some
      point in my marriage I discovered that he
      didn’t know the color of my eyes. He didn’t
      know the color of his eyes either. He wasn’t
      color-blind: he was just indifferent. I asked
      him as a personal favor to learn the color of
      my eyes by heart and he did. My friend Irene
      even suggested creating a support group for the
      wives of such mathematicians.
    

I'm really bad when it comes to this sort of thing. My partner often quizzes
me on things that were apparently "discussed" which I actually didn't hear
because I was engrossed in something else.

I'm generally very apathetic which makes my partner question whether I love
them sometimes. It _is_ peculiar why we should love.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _My partner often quizzes me on things that were apparently "discussed"
> which I actually didn't hear because I was engrossed in something else._

I absolutely _hate_ that. I have a pretty good memory, I do remember lot of
random trivias about conversations. And yet my SO can _always_ find something
that I missed, and likes to ask me about it few weeks after it was first
spoken. I try to convince her to find another way of "checking" my attention,
because this won't "fix" my memory. It'll only make me paranoid.

EDIT:

Another thing that I actually learned for her is the color of her eyes. I'm
not indifferent. I simply don't notice. Maybe it's because of being myopic for
most of my life, or maybe because I'm wired differently - but my brain just
doesn't register those details unless I explicitly focus on them. Similarly, I
often can't tell when someone brightened or darkened their hair (that is,
unless it's something like going from blond to black). I suck at remembering
faces, couldn't describe them from memory to save my life, and usually I even
quickly forget what clothes someone is wearing. So my only countertip to this
article is - for the love of $DEITY, don't assume everyone is sensitive to
minor appearance changes. For some, it doesn't register. And it's not because
of indifference.

------
tilt_error
My brother is a dentist. At four he leaves his office and goes home.

I have worked with software development for quite some time. The nasty thing
is that lately it has become so easy to connect to work, fire up the dev-
environment from home on evenings and weekends to continue tinker with that
piece of code or that nasty bug.

Imagine having a job where your problem is not constrained to a person that
has to be in your vicinity for you to work or a job where you cannot at least
fake that you have problems with your internet connection :)

You cannot easily unscrew your head at the end of the day and it is only too
natural to continue to linger in your head in problem-solving mode. Imagine
doing this for the greater part of your life and you may end up with exactly
the problems described here.

------
srean
Thanks to mobile phones we can at least pace around and talk to ourselves
without appearing crazy.

------
joshguthrie
_Should you date a mathematician or not?

_Yes.

