​First off, I have to thank each and every one of you that entered this contest. It's not easy to share your personal tales of romantic triumph and tragedy with (mostly futile) hopes of winning a free T-shirt, but nearly 300 of you did. Well done. I found your insights to be touching and, at times, surprisingly heartbreaking. Again, I do truly appreciate you all telling me about your nerdy dating experiences. (Or lack thereof). Now if only you guys actually paid attention to the contest intro and kept your entries brief. Sigh. Oh well.

Unfortunately, I only had two TR shirts to give away. I picked winners whose stories captivated/horrified me, and I hope you'll agree with my findings. As you'll see by the quality of the honorable mentions, coming up with the actual winners was a Herculean task to say the least. Hit the jump to see what I came up with.


Here are the honorable mentions:

Brando Lars:

Back in college there was a super Hot girl in the Sci-Fi club I belonged to. But she was dating an acquaintance. One day in one of our School's many lounges the boyfriend turns to me and asks me to spend some time with his girlfriend over the long weekend because he was worried about leaving her alone. You see I found out that apparently she had cheated on him the last time he went away and he didn't trust her to be left alone. (but he did trust me to be left alone with her sigh) He had NO IDEA of the feelings I had been harboring for this girl for 3 semesters. I agreed to go and see her that weekend. Saturday I spend 3 hours traveling to and from her house each way, We sat and talked for 4 hours and she explain the entire cheating incident to me as if it was a confessional. Mean while all the while I'm thinking "me, I might as well just be a girlfriend......." Then she went out with some friend for a night on the town and I took the bus home. This girl might very well have been the ultimate geek chick into RPG and videogames but she couldn't keep it out of her pants . with everyone but me. Sigh. In hindsight the fact that we knew each other from the Sci-Fi fantasy club is the only thing that really makes this geeky.

Monkey boy:

I went on a couple of dates with this nerdy girl. They were okay, but then I saw on Facebook she entered into a relationship with another guy. No big deal because we only went out like twice, but this is the bad part: I saw his pic on Facebook and he was wearing this Woot shirt (disapproving narwhal) that I had ordered but got lost in the mail. So he got the girl and the shirt, but it was the shirt that hurt the most.

Fumbles:

I was hanging out with a friend of mine. We were board and she decided to turn on Netflix to see what was on. We found the Star Trek animated series. She looked at me and asked if I was ok with it. I love star trek so I was down. We watched the entire season that weekend, we're now engaged. I'd call that a win.

Doc:

So I'm not sure if this is the best or worst, frankly it could have gone either way. Considering that we're still together I'll call it best.

So I met a wonderful, beautiful woman named April. It was something of a blind date since we had some mutual friends but hadn't met in person yet though we had talked online. We decide to meet up at a nearby bar and we find that we're enjoying eachother's company but that the bar is a little too noisy to have a real conversation. Since there's a beach nearby we figure it would be great to get some privacy and get a chance to talk while having a walk on the beach late at night.

Eventually the topic of nerdy interests come up and I admit that I'm a pretty big nerd. She admits that she's most definitely not nerdy but that she somehow finds my enthusiam slightly adorable without being overbearing.

Feeling brave I decided to push my luck and to try to find SOME kind of nerdy common ground so I start listing the various nerdy things I'm into when I finally run across Harry Potter. When HP comes up her interest suddenly goes from benign disinterest to grabbing my shirt with a mad look in her eyes yelling "I WANT TO BE A WIZARD!"

Considering we were on a deserted beach late at night this should have been more than a little terrifying but I'm glad I didn't run screaming because I've wound up with a beautiful woman who is able to laugh with me about how obsessive we can get over our respective passions.

IronicMan:

Girlfriend breaks up just as you're about to finish off season 2 of Doctor Who. I don't want to watch Daleks fighting Cybermen by myself- a lonely nerdgasm is a sad nerdgasm.

Mat-Man:

My girlfriend (who I'm madly in love with) posted our relationship as her best nerd relationship on Topless Robot's Best/Worst Nerd Relationship contest.  No matter who gets the shirt, I think I win this contest.

Bazzzinga:

Well a couple or so years ago I had a pretty big thing for the sister of one of my mates, I'd been friends with her for a little while and she was nice, really cute and her only problem was that she was not at all nerdy, but I really didn't care. So one day when I was invited to a party at her house that's when I decided, I was gonna go to that party hang out with her and try to act as normal and non-nerdily charming as possible to atleast be in a chance of getting out of her friend zone.

We were about an hour into the party and things were going pretty well, but that's when I saw it, a beautiful metallic object glistening in the light of a nearby TV Screen, her
brother was holding a Luke Skywalker Master Replicas lightsaber with realistic lighting and original sound effects, I had to go and inspect it and while we were chatting about how awesome it was he told me he'd also just gotten the Darth Vader version and that we should totally have a duel with them to test them out. Blinded by nerdy desire I agreed but decided that if we did it outside and tried to be as discreet as possible, I could probably get away with the duel without hurting my chances with his sister. But what was supposed to be a quick 10 minute duel quickly turned into a 45 minute long epic complete with movie quotes, Darth Maul choreography impersonations and ended with a who could do the best Darth Vader "NOOOOO!" contest.

It was when we got back in that we realised we'd been the nerdy entertainment from the bathroom window for the whole time. And needless to say his sister who'd seen the whole spectacle now viewed me about as likely a potential romantic partner as a cancerous cyst on a Sarlaccs tentacle. But it all worked out fine in the end she met someone and fell in love... I got myself four Master Replicas lightsabers and grew increasingly nerdy and bitter, incidentally it's about the same time I started commenting on Topless Robot.

Four years ago, I was working with my aunt at the fairgrounds in my town in one of the food booths. There were a few guys working there with me, all of them really cute, but one of them stood head and shoulders above the rest (literally; he's 6'3"). Tall, skinny, glasses, kind of shy, the most gorgeous smile I'd ever seen. I flirt with him the whole time, and he's obviously into me, too, but he's really introverted and doesn't say much. He's only working for the one day, though, so I decide to take it upon myself and ask him out on a date, since he's obviously too shy to ask me himself. We go on our date...and it's pure, unadulterated magic. We find out we both love the same things: anime, MST3K, Thomas Dolby, The Big Lebowski, retro video games. We quote and act out almost the entire Ghostbusters movie. While seeing a movie at the drive-in he comes back from the bathroom and gives me a bootleg Yu-Gi-Oh card he found because he knew I'd get a kick out of the bad translation. He's totally awesome and out of his shell at this point. He told me later while we were sitting in the car at the drive-in together that he never used to be that shy, but his past girlfriends and girls in general over the years treated him like dirt because of the things he liked, and he was afraid that I would do the same. I hugged him and said I thought the he, and what he liked, was wonderful.

We've been together ever since, been married two years and have two kids now.

GrimlockPrime:

I am a member of a Medieval re-enacting group. I take great pride in my Scottish heritage & enjoy putting on a Great Kilt & doing public demonstrations of swordsmanship. Two years ago, I met a girl at a Renaissance Fair. She was a friend of a member of the re-enacting group.  She was wearing a medieval dress, and she was beautiful. It took me a while to muster up the courage to finally start a conversation. After a little while, we found out that we had a lot in common. She came back for the second day of the Fair & we spend most of our time getting to know each other. After having the BEST. DAY. EVER!, we arranged to hang out the next weekend. I was terrified that she would run away when she saw my respectable Transformers & LEGO collections. Instead, she looked at me & asked "Can I play with them?" I fell in love that week & have never been happier.

We are getting married this fall, with a Medieval Themed wedding.

Caitlin:

When this contest was posted yesterday I immediately went past it since I'd had absolutely no romantic anything in my life and there was no way I could post an entry.

Well, last night I had my first kiss with the guy who played Dr. Horrible in my student-run production of it backstage during a talent show I was MCing. It may be the only thing that I've done, but it's still the best.

Naturally I assume that it happened because I was destined to win a shirt this time around.

adnomad:

I really only have a best for me. I was talking to this girl and she knew I was a nerd but I didn't think she was anything of one. She worked with me and found me and a co-worker talking about how we found it odd that there was a Klingon dictionary and how there were colleges that taught it. She over heard and basically went over how stupid that she thought it was. I knew all of this but not a big Klingon guy and was now mildly embarrassed. The next day, she delivered me a letter in Vulcan. It had nothing to do with Star Trek, it was about how dumb she thought Klingons were. We've been together for 5 years.

TomeMinder:

I was dating my first and, so far, only girlfriend and we went to her apartment for a little "fun".  At this point I had never done anything and was finally trusting her enough to go for that intimacy.  We spent some time chatting about movies and stuff before she finally decided to stop waiting for me to take the lead and started a rather intense make-out session.  I was actually guiding her toward the bedroom when she started kissing my neck and glanced up at the clock.  In a split second she pushed me away, ran to the living room and logged into her WoW account.  I asked her what they hell she was doing and she informed me, without a shred of sarcasm or apology, that she had a raid she was integral to and needed to hook up with the group. So I wouldn't be lonely while she gamed she called a mutual friend to come over and hang out with me.

Essentially, I was cock-blocked by World of Warcraft.

Ryno_Noobslayer:

Worst:

She thinks Jar Jar Binks is the best thing about Star Wars....nobody is perfect..

Dancore: