1.
When you love a programmer, you must to learn to love the back of his head. You must love his curls at the nape of his neck as much, if not more, than his eyes.
Learn every inch of his body, every freckle, every rib, every muscle, even when they soften with time. But know that if there is one thing you must master, it is the back of his head.
He will be forever a student, forever a learner, forever bent away from you towards a small black window.
You will meet him before he is a programmer. He will always bent away from you anyhow. His head will be bent up to behold a theater lighting rig, or stooped inside a five-gallon boiling pot of home-brewed beer. He will have his eyes trained on the road while driving you to Taco Bell across a serene Hudson River, or he will be bent over his much-loved copy of Ulysses, his eyes just as underlined as the text.
You will love this about him. You will think, “We. We are passionate. We are learners.”
You may think you love him. And chances are, you do. But realize what it is that you are loving: a neck, always strained, unable to swivel towards you without feeling the crick tighten.
2.
He’ll explain that the code languages he learns are more efficient, more powerful, more intricate ways of speaking. Never tell him you imagine him casting spells as he hunches over his laptop. These were languages that mirror our own but also weren’t our own, a new grammar that could give answers rather than hide them, new rules for ancient punctuation.
The English language never was, and never will be, kind to him. It’s a language of rejection, abandonment, never the right phrasing, too many possibilities for heartache.
Don’t be alarmed when he becomes obsessed with programming the calories he ingests, the steps he takes, the hours of REM cycles achieved, the jagged spikes of his heartbeat. Gently encourage him until it becomes obsessive, back off when he tells you he’s doing just fine, it’s good to count all of these things, wouldn’t you want to know? Here are the answers, written in code. The code tells him something, more than ancient, meaningless words.
You will find this a challenge: keep him talking to you a little while longer.
What you will never say is this: all of this data is nothing compared to the feeling of your constant anxiety quieting when he crawls into bed beside you at night. You already know the way your heart sighs slowly when he makes you laugh. The nights you watch the sun set from his Bed-Stuy balcony are you two at your greatest, bathed in melted sherbet light under an undulating pink sky. The delicate circuitry of your heart nearly collapses the night he climbs into your bed, a little drunk and sorry he is so late, gathering you into his arms like a found goddess fallen to earth, whispering that he loves you so much.
Be gentle when he awakes from bad dreams that have no answers. One morning he will wake up having dreamt of being in his mother’s house, where he heard something hit the front door with a wet thud. When he opens the door in this dream, it will be his estranged father’s head on the stoop, wet and bleeding and opened to reveal a working brain.
When he wakes up shaking and asks you what it means, tell him the truth. There is no code for dream-reading.
3.
The code will be his mistress. It won’t be the pixie-haired women in the shadowy doorway at the party you need to worry about, or the sexy neighbor across the hall playing foreign crooners on her turntable, or the coworker with the short skirts and filthy sense of humor.
The curve of letters slithering along the screen, poetic numbers, punctuation: that’s what will seduce him. His code will determine all of him. Those fragile feelings will depend entirely on tests of his work, run with wild eyes you can only see in the reflection of his terminal screen. Ruby to tell him if he’s an artist. Java to tell him if he is a man. PHP will tell him it he’s strong, if he’ll make the distance. If he’ll catch up to all the other programmers who have been doing this better for longer for more money.
Don’t you see, the test didn’t work, I can’t leave now, this can’t go on without being fixed.
4.
He will stare at a screen all day. You’ll find he slouches more, his neck always aching no matter how much love you send it, how many kisses you lay upon it, his back a slow curving C.
You grow to feel tired, staring at that neck, even when you feel love for it. You tell him you’re meeting a friend for lunch, going shopping, seeing your parents, and he’ll slump more. He whispers into your stomach, does that thing where he lifts the back of your shirt, fits his fingers, knotted from typing, into your spine, softly caressing every inch of your hips.
Try to keep your spine erect, your shoulders strong, but always, always, you’ll curve into him, two interlocking Cs. When he thrusts himself inside you, wet with want, it will be to the sound of the purring laptop fan.
5.
The end is his birthday, when you’re walking with him to the liquor store in the afternoon, and you walk along the prettiest street you’ve come across yet in his neighborhood. It’s a hidden gem, gorgeous brownstones huddled all together, a row of petite, rainbow Victorian homes. Remark how beautiful it is, the early September day, everything bathed in buttercup light. The sun is shining and it’s the first and only summer walk you will have taken all season.
He’ll agree, but you can’t help see how pale he looks in the warm light, how dark and heavy the bags under his eyes look, how shifty he seems, how uncomfortable he is away from his desk. He’ll always walks so fast whenever you two go anywhere. Let go of his hand as you stop to stare at the most perfect periwinkle house. Slightly dilapidated, it belongs at the end of a whimsical rural road, not in the middle of Brooklyn. There are whirligigs outside, plastic pinwheels and nylon flags that ought to feel tacky but don’t. A young couple laughing on the steps, the woman perfectly swollen in her last months of pregnancy. Everyone on the street will be happy and laughing but you and your partner, who keeps walking on without you, who turns around to say, “Why do you walk so slow? It’s annoying. Like you’re trying to piss me off or something.”
For all his algorithms, he’ll never figure out your speed.
6.
When he accuses you of giving up on “we,” of giving up on him, tell him he’s not wrong. The set of the data you two have amassed together in the course of three years will be through. There will be nothing else to collect, no other courses to run. He will fail your test. He will fail you. If you stay together, you will continue to fail him, quietly, until one day he leaves you.
Leave. Only look back to know that at least the test was run. He is not yours, his is a project you must leave for someone else.
The work will never leave you. It will find you in the other handsome software engineer you meet at a party, at the bottom of translucent brown beer bottles, in the strong nape and curls of another lover down the line. On the quietest nights, you’ll still dream of the back of his neck.
SARAHHHHHHHHH
Even though I’ve dated my share of programmers and parts of this ring true, I am very, very tired of the romanticization of programming as the secret magic domain of geeky young men, especially when women are portrayed as serving or competing for the attention of the male programmers in their lives. The gender roles here seem right out of a 1950s women’s magazine. “Ruby to tell him he is a man”? Really?
Yeah, this also rubbed me the wrong way. I’m a (woman) programmer, married to a (man) programmer, and this really sounded like all that shit I get from my relatives.
Nosy aunt: “Ooooh, does he spend all the time in front of the monitor and ignore you? Programmers are sooo diffiiiicult”.
Me: “I wouldn’t know. I spend all of my time in front of the monitor.”
Nosy aunt: “Oh, but it’s different, you’re a GIRL and BLAH BLAH BLAH bullshit.”
It’s just… nope.
(Also, programmers can also cheat on their partners with other humans, not just code. How I hate the “genius person whose INSERT NAME OF FAVORITE THING HERE is his only mistress” trope.)
Yup, I am a (woman) programmer and while reading this I identified more with the man, and thought about those people I have dated who have been irritated by my interest in the work and analytical way of approaching life (which predated my study of computers and of course in my case is easy to brand as “unfeminine” rather than “tortured genius”, so).
Ummmm pretty sure programming is like casting magic spells though, ergo my username and why I think it is super fun and awesome.
Yeah; I mean, I’m sitting in bed right now next to my software engineer boyfriend, who is writing code on his laptop, but it really didn’t match reality for me. Sure, he loves writing code and does it a lot, but he also likes the English language and talking to me and going out and doing things. The “coders are reclusive geniuses who can love nothing else” thing is a weird stereotype. (ETA: also, reliant on unpleasant gender stereotypes.)
This stinks, man. It reinforces the imaginary divide between “the English language” and programming as though they were the alleged Mars and Venus of the new millennium. It reinforces programming being for dudes only, for biostat-obsessed dudes who can’t pay attention to other people. None of this is about programming. I’m a woman programmer and this piece makes my skin crawl.
I look forward to the next entries in this series of “Dudes Facing Away From You To Do Important Things While You, A Lady, Contemplate Your Feelings” (“When you love a doctor, you must learn to love his beeper…”)
I guess now that the arts have become associated with women, the new unattainable, detached, emotionally-unavailable romantic male archetype for women who date men has gone from painter/poet/etc. to programmer?
I could go on about how many English majors and/or writers end up in tech, but you know.
EXACTLY. We shall never understand his noble calling; we can only be his helpmeet (and put up with his bullshit, because of course all programmers are a) socially challenged and b) so damn special we don’t care).
I’m not a programmer, but I never wish I were more than when I’m reading stuff like this.
I put way more stock in my 2 years of high school computer science than I should. Especially when things like this piece happen.
But he has a tortured past and that’s why he’s so emotionally unavailable! If you don’t rescue him, who will?
(PS: In college I tried to date a guy who was like this, only with theology; I nonironically thank God that never went anywhere)
Thank you for saying this. I’m a (woman) English major who became a programmer, and it’s amazing how angry this article made me. Not just because romanticizing detached men who don’t love you enough is fucked up (regardless of profession), but also because this separation between the humanities and tech is so artificial and so damaging both to the tech industry and to those of us who don’t fit this archetype and are trying to make our way in it. I am so glad that the commentators on the Toast immediately identified this article for what it is.
Quick! They’ve stormed the garrets! Find a new place to brood.
I really didn’t feel like the essay romanticized him at all; he comes off as self-absorbed and awful, she comes off as someone with a tenuous sense of self who wants her partner to validate her. I feel like a lot of the comments are not critical of the piece itself so much as they are critical of the author having an immature relationship, which is a little unfair because who hasn’t?
That’s a fair point. I’ve certainly had several one-side relationships, in terms of emotional investment. I’ve even said, “I’m never dating another musician!” When what I really meant was, “I’m never dating another person who expects me to pour a bunch of my time into their projects, and who does not reciprocate by suppoting mine.” There are muscians who make wonderful partners; there are partners of muscians who have better boundaries than I did when I was young. It’s fine to have a bumpy relationship and be a little raw about it, but in a personal essay that has been published, there are understandably higher standards for reflection, especially when it comes to gender stereotyping and over-generalizing.
I think what got under some people’s skin, or at least mine, is that the piece doesn’t awknowledge that emotional unavailability and inability to communicate feelings (not coincidentally flaws that are often coded as male) are not actual fundamental qualities of programmers. In fact, at the end of the piece, this quote (“The work will never leave you. It will find you in the other handsome software engineer you meet at a party, at the bottom of translucent brown beer bottles, in the strong nape and curls of another lover down the line.”) suggests that another handsome software engineer will just step into that dynamic, per force of being a handsome (again a word that hints at maleness) software engineer.
Were I an engineer, especially as a woman who would have to combat stereotypes of this sort daily (the ones that imply that I am unlike the ‘ideal’ engineer, or not really the right ‘type’), I can see being really dismayed by the assumptions in the article. I mean, I am a bit dismayed.
I’m a woman. I’m a programmer. I’m passionate about it and quite good at it, too. I’m a lifelong learner, or I try to be. I study sometimes.
My fiance doesn’t have to learn to love the back of my head because I care about people more than I care about ideas. Please don’t perpetuate stereotypes that women in tech are fighting all the time.
“When he thrusts himself inside you, wet with want, it will be to the sound of the purring laptop fan.”
What the hell did I just read?
Yeah, uh, it’s real badly written on top of the poor messaging.
Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to get busy and a purring laptop fan jumps on the bed because your programmer boyfriend didn’t shut the door?
Just push it off. Or shut it in the bathroom.
There’s nothing I hate more than having to trap my laptop in another room and listen to it scratch at the door for hours.
Only programmers use laptops, remember?
Do the thrusts sound like a laptop fan? Has this man successfully breached the barriers of biology and made himself a cyborg thanks to Programming?
If that’s the case, this story’s burying the lede.
He’s so focused on his electronics that laptop fans are his baby making music?
I’m an English major programmer who agrees with a lot of what’s already been said. I don’t mean to pile on, just to explain what about the piece I found frustrating. It repeats and reinforces these ides: programming is math, not liberal arts; code language, not verbal language. Programming is for obsessives, not people who want work/life balance. Programming is for people who aren’t good with people. In other words, programming is male.
But it’s not, and it never has been. None of the above is true, and all of those stereotypes are used to exclude women from the field. Blaming a person’s hobbies and not their ability to balance them with a relationship is harmless if the hobby is something like microbrewing, but the “emotionally unavailable obsessive male nerd programmer” stereotype is something I have to push against every day just to get my job done. It’s depressing to see it repeated here.
I imagine plenty of male programmers would be annoyed by how this piece opposes coding skills and emotional intelligence. Men, even geeky ones, are still capable of empathy and active emotional engagement. Maybe this didn’t happen in the relationship the author is describing, but especially in light of Jess Zimmerman’s piece on emotional labor a few weeks ago, it’s frustrating to see such an unequal relationship generalized and idealized like this. Dating a programmer doesn’t make you a lighthouse keeper.
*is male, and a programmer*
*agrees with everything in this comment*
“The English language never was, and never will be, kind to him. It’s a language of rejection, abandonment, never the right phrasing, too many possibilities for heartache.”
Or maybe it is time we let go of that stereotype. We, the amorphous blob that you lob software engineers in, are not all recluses, afraid of human contact, unable to grasp the nuances of language. We’re as alive and as diverse as the rest of humanity.
I’m sorry the author failed to see that. I’m sorry her partner was that guarded. But I’m tired of hearing this.
“For all his algorithms, he’ll never figure out your speed.”
And for all her love of language, the author never figured out his. While she loved the back of his neck, and how wonderfully it looked in her prose, I’m not that sure she ever bothered to really figure out her partner, either. Two people, thinking they are in love, realizing that they loved the image more than the person. It’s a sad story, but their respective professions have no bearing on it.
I enjoyed reading this; it was sad and uncomfortable in spots, but good stories often are. Other commenters have already made valid points about the equivalence drawn between programming=math=maleness and social skills=relationship skills=femaleness, so I won’t repeat them. I do want to say that before I had gotten very far into the piece and figured out that it was supposed to be a specific situation with specific people (while I was still taking the general “you” at face value), I identified really strongly with this:
“He will always bent away from you anyhow. His head will be bent up to behold a theater lighting rig, or stooped inside a five-gallon boiling pot of home-brewed beer. He will have his eyes trained on the road while driving you to Taco Bell across a serene Hudson River, or he will be bent over his much-loved copy of Ulysses, his eyes just as underlined as the text.”
Pronouns and the fact that I’m not a programmer aside, I spent most of the piece self-inserting as the guy just because of this paragraph. My eyes are always going to things instead of people, and I feel a lot of wonder when I look at something and haven’t yet figured out how it works, and a lot of contentment when I look at something and already know. So I really like this paragraph, for describing that thing that I do.
I can see the flaws in this story’s approach toward presenting the specific dynamic in this relationship as being somehow based in the nature of programming or manhood, and painting it as universal – I think the 2nd person was a poor choice for narrative point of view for that reason. But I’m glad it was posted on the Butter and I appreciated having the opportunity to read it. Overall, it was good.
I agree. Once I figured out that this was about a specific relationship, I kind of relaxed about the stereotypes and went with it. Other pieces on The Toast and The Butter have played with the specific / general twist, but I think this one hit a nerve with a lot of readers because of the specific stereotypes.
Hmm, I got some pangs reading this (which I’m doing at work, while I wait to hear back on a final requirement so I can return to programming it – bc I’m a software engineer).
I was a world languages major in undergrad and I totally (thought I) fell in love with a programmer who eventually broke my heart, and this hit some of those feels pretty hard. Here’s the thing though; I eventually realized what I actually had fallen in love with was learning about computer science from my programmer boyfriend, and missed it a lot. And that was actionable. So I went back to school and changed careers and now I don’t miss that ex at all and have a job I LOVE.
This is probably just me projecting hardcore, but it can be a weird thing to discover a topic or field you like later in life via an intense relationship and can lead to strangely conflating skills and opportunity with gender or personality I think. Just what struck me, what with how fixated the piece is on the former lover’s career and how into it he was. I did that too, and it was because I was JEALOUS of those things, not in love with him.
tl;dr I think this piece might be about me circa Junior year of college. So while I don’t love the stereotypes it relies on and reinforces, I enjoyed reading it a lot! (In a sort of painful nostalgic stupidity of the past kind of way).
Oh my gosh, I love that so much!
I feel like the only thing that could have redeemed this essay is something along the lines of “And when we finally meet again, three years later, at an all-night hackathon, he gazes at the back of my neck as I code up a Flask app far faster than he had ever managed to do in PHP or Ruby”.
But instead it ends on another “handsome software engineer”, blargh
Just to throw this in the mix-I liked the writing style. I agree that the message is a little retro, but then so was the relationship. I feel like that may have been part of the point. And although the sweeping generalizations about programmers didn’t add anything to the story, I would imagine it might be hard to separate out someone’s awful self-centered personality from the thing they’re focused the most on when you’re the one in a relationship.
This is an Butter piece, it’s a personal essay about some crystallized moments and experiences from this one woman’s past. Not everything has to carry the banner. Just because it’s a trope doesn’t mean someone hasn’t lived it. I’m a (female) hobbyist coder and have certainly found myself in a tunnel hitting compile just one more time to find that last bug for over an hour. There are things to relate to in here.
It is a personal experience with relateable moments, which is exactly why it’s problematic that the author generalized her experience to an essay about what it’s like to love a programmer and what programmers are like.
The problem here isn’t that the essay doesn’t “carry the banner” — I agree that not everything needs to be explicitly feminist or political. The problem is that it walks all over the banner. Just leave the banner sitting in the closet. Talk about *your* programmer. Talk about *your* experience. Don’t assert that this is more universal than that.
I agree. Once I figured out that this was about a specific relationship, I kind of relaxed about the stereotypes and went with it. Other pieces on The Toast and The Butter have played with the specific / general twist, but I think this one hit a nerve with a lot of readers because of the specific stereotypes.
It is a personal experience with relateable moments, which is exactly why it's problematic that the author generalized her experience to an essay about what it's like to love a programmer and what programmers are like.
The problem here isn't that the essay doesn't "carry the banner" — I agree that not everything needs to be explicitly feminist or political. The problem is that it walks all over the banner. Just leave the banner sitting in the closet. Talk about *your* programmer. Talk about *your* experience. Don't assert that this is more universal than that.
This is beautiful.
I like this essay. While I recognize that in today’s world, there isn’t appropriate consideration given to women in tech, I did not see that as a problem in this particular article. I saw this as an expression of Sarah Rosenthal’s personal struggle in her own relationship. The roles could have easily been reversed and it would have been just as moving to me. I doubt she wrote this to make you feel better about how women are underrepresented in the tech industry. This is her story. Let her have that.