This is something that I think about a lot, actually.
If you love writing and history and art and like talking about them with your friends, would it make sense to marry someone with no interest in those things?
Maybe! Obviously, some people marry complements, differences can attract, and so on. But please consider the other viewpoint.
Isn't it often the case that people choose to be in a relationship with other people who can understand their passions? If your passion is starting a business, or political participation, or world travel, or teaching, or surfing, what would your friends tell you about getting into a relationship with someone who doesn't value those things, and whose expectations of a normal life frankly preclude you spending quality time with that passion?
My passion is programming. And I really enjoy doing it with others.
Is it unrealistic to want to end up with someone I can have an outside chance of sharing gists with?
I think the 'few women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck.
Edit: 'out of luck' if what we want to do is share our specific passion with the person we spend the rest of our life with. If that doesn't matter to you, or the definition of sharing your passion doesn't involve talking code or coding with your SO, then you're lucky!
Seriously, don't sweat this. While your logic is completely valid, one thing I've learned in personal relationships is that logic is, in-and-of-itself, rather useless in determining relationship success.
Unless you're a robot, people come with things like emotions and feelings and all kinds of other baggage that are impervious to logic. Not just your partner, but yourself. And you usually don't realize it until later.
Your expectations about spending time with someone who shares your passion isn't unrealistic at all. But in the end, a relationship is about people, not your passion. You may find a partner because of your passion, but he/she will stick around because of who you are -- not what you do.
Finding people who share your passions is relatively easy. We advertise them on our sleeves. There are, literally, catalogs and clubs and conferences and books and lecture circuits and cruises devoted to any given pastime, from Ethiopian funk music of the 1970s to small-scale software companies focused on order tracking.
Finding a romantic partner or a spouse is a wholly different problem which generally plays out on a completely different level.
Teachers should only marry teachers? Nurses should only marry nurses? It doesn't work in the "other" direction, why should it work in this? (Remember, gender disparities entirely as strong as computer science exist in the other direction; people just don't angst about them as much.)
I'd present an alternate point of view, as someone who has been married to not-a-programmer for 11 years now... passion != monomania. You probably ought to have something other than programming you can talk about and incorporate into a relationship. I won't quite say monomania is "bad", but it isn't without costs, and certainly ancient wisdom has expounded the benefits of being a well-rounded person for a very, very long time. It's not wrong.
As a female programmer I get the same blank stares from a lot of men also. I explain what my programs do and how they make certain processes more efficient, talk about our customer stories. But then, I don't work for SAP or some vague consultancy firm. I have a friend who is a manager in an oil company: I have no idea what he does day to day but I do know that he gets to take a helicopter to work sometimes. We talk about the cool stuff.
I think the 'no women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck.
While I agree with your basic sentiment that "the no women in tech" thing does limit social opportunities in that regard, that isn't what you say in your closing sentence. Your closing sentence is a great deal more sweeping and I think it's inaccurate.
In circles I have hung out in at various times, referring to the husband as "in house tech support" was bragging rights. In my experience, an awful lot of men who can't get a date are so sure no woman would want _________ that they make it absolutely impossible to tell them "Uh, actually, I'm real into men like that". They put women in a position where admitting you actually think they are attractive and all/most of the things they are listing about themselves as negatives are viewed as positives gets spun into "god what a loser. who would do her?" It becomes a case of "I wouldn't join any club that would have me" type thing. Furthermore, I typically shy away from trying to give people a clue who clearly need one when posting on public forums because it puts me in danger of having it misinterpreted as an invitation and being mobbed by unwanted attention. I mention that only to suggest that statements like that tend to become self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing prophecy.
(For the record: I am currently celibate for medical reasons and not looking for a relationship. Please don't (anyone) tempt me to go into stomach-churning details about why you (plural) don't want to hit that. Thanks.)
Please call it the "fewer women in tech" thing. I know you intend "no women in tech" as hyperbole, but it makes some women feel erased (not to mention erasing important history), and I know that's not your goal!
My wife doesn't get my work, but that's actually good in some respects. I would personally grow bored if we could only communicate on a technical level. Some things are better when they don't make sense and you can't exactly put your finger on why.
In the end I find it keeps me grounded in reality. Sometimes her perspective is the cold shower my technical enthusiasm needs to focus.
So, here is the list of the things that I'm most passionate about (all with equal weight):
* Application Security
* Black and White fine art photography with an emphasis on people
* western furniture from 1910-1965
* The women's fashion industry between 1990-2000
* 20th Century Russian literature
* Syncopation in drumming
My girlfriend has absolutely zero interest in any of those. Sometimes she'll patronize me when I start going off on a tangent about one of them, but more often than not, she'll stop me and say "elevator" which is her code to let me know to just give her the highlight of what I'm talking about.
If I were compiling a list of qualities for an ideal relationship partner, I might include any or all of those as things I'd like them to share an interest in. It would seem to be beneficial to be with someone with similar interests.
I've known people who share similar interests. I don't quite think there's another person who shares all of my passions, but with the exception of application security (for what it's worth, I've yet to have a relationship with someone else who likes busting applications), I've been with people who are also passionate about those things. There's been no appreciable difference in how those relationships have turned out.
The one thing which I do think is of the utmost importance, is for your relationship partner to understand "passion", regardless of what your passion is in.
My girlfriend is a writer. She understands that when I'm sitting at my computer for long periods of time swearing about session id's and verbose error messages I'm in a similar state to how she gets when she's sitting in front of her computer writing.
She loves how excited I get when I storm out of my office into the kitchen and tell her "They're totally fucked, I can take money from other people's accounts." If I start to regale her with the method I've used to perform such an activity; she gives me the look, and I stop. But she gets why I'm excited.
So I'm not going to go so far as to say that it'd be a bad thing to be in a relationship with someone who shares the same passions as you, but I will say I think the key is finding someone with passion about anything. Someone who will give you support when you're spinning your wheels, or can't quite figure out how to do what you want to do. Those people are keepers.
I do not think that anyone can dispute that not sharing your SO's passions on some level is not a good thing. Over simplifying the comment with outliers does not negate the validity of the comment. If you are with someone that is the most awesome person in the world and the fact that they do not share your central passion can be over looked you are not the norm you are the unusual and as th OP said consider your self very lucky. Although, if people were completely objective most would admit that it would be better if their SO did share their passions, regardless of how good there relationship is now.
I somewhat "solved" this problem by marrying a designer. She might not be the one I geek out about code with, but she sure as hell understands and forgives long hours in front of the computer and appreciates when the final product performs well, looks beautiful and is easy to use.
At the end of the day I didn't marry her because of that though. If sharing a single passion would be the key to a successful marriage, I think we'd see whole lot less divorces and many more same-sex marriages.
I had to think for 30 seconds before I understood what SO was actually supposed to mean in your last sentence, as Stack Overflow didn't seem to fit in...
If you love writing and history and art and like talking about them with your friends, would it make sense to marry someone with no interest in those things?
Maybe! Obviously, some people marry complements, differences can attract, and so on. But please consider the other viewpoint.
Isn't it often the case that people choose to be in a relationship with other people who can understand their passions? If your passion is starting a business, or political participation, or world travel, or teaching, or surfing, what would your friends tell you about getting into a relationship with someone who doesn't value those things, and whose expectations of a normal life frankly preclude you spending quality time with that passion?
My passion is programming. And I really enjoy doing it with others.
Is it unrealistic to want to end up with someone I can have an outside chance of sharing gists with?
I think the 'few women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck.
Edit: 'out of luck' if what we want to do is share our specific passion with the person we spend the rest of our life with. If that doesn't matter to you, or the definition of sharing your passion doesn't involve talking code or coding with your SO, then you're lucky!