10 reasons why programmers suck at relationships

This is not actually a happy post. This is a sad post ☹️ I regret you clicked on it. What made you click on this post?

Let me make a rough assumption. You are among those two people who landed on this post because:

1. 😲 You don't want to get sucked at relationship in future,
2. 😕 You already sucked multiple times & looking for some advise

Life is a complicated journey. Let me explain you in programmer's language why. Say you are a single person and you have 10 things going on in your life. Say out of those 5 of them are important things such as life, career, degree, relationships etc. To have a fulfilling life, you need to have all of them right. If you cannot perform good at one, you won't get much out of it. All of them does not need to be perfect, but at least they need to be having deep dependencies among themselves.

What I mean is that your career should not be dependent on the relationships you are having. This is because the above principle I talked before fails in that case because out of 10 things if 2 things are dependent and you made a mistake in one of those, both 2 things suck.

The problem starts when among those 10 things, the most crucial one - the relationship starts to suck 😥. The reason is that building a relationship requires time and energy. It takes a big investment to create a healthy relationship. When you are in a relationship, there are now not only 10 things in your life, it actually becomes 10(you) + 10(other person) = 20 things. For a good relationship most of them needs to be performing good from where the risk seem to be maximised ⚠️. Investing a good amount of time in relationships is good but it also comes with a cost because of the amount of resources invested.

Roughly, here are the 10 things I think it is hard for programmers to perform good on relationships:

1. ⏰ Time management:
   Especially when you are just starting out, learning programming takes so much time and energy besides your work schedule so at this stage, the relationship starts to suck.

2. 😩 Struggling to find a boundary between coding and building relationships:
   Even after few years of experience, it is still hard to manage time because if you are working on a startup, you need to wear many hats due to which it takes continuous amount of energy to research on new topics and implement them.

3. 🤔 Realization that cultivating knowledge is better than investing in someone who might turn at any time:
   Mostly, programmers realise this at the early stage of their career when the relationship already started sucking a little bit. That bitter experience teaches a lesson that investing in learning and growing yourself pays off better than worrying about other person.

4. 👎 Degrading soft skills - you became more and more introvert and your circle shrinks continuously:
   Programmers also suck because after few years of coding in small startup, they have a limited circle and due to some reasons they cannot also build the new relationships which means they are not much social. This in some degree impacts the interpersonal skill too.

5. 😶 If your relationship is already going bad then programming can make add more more reason to worsen it:
   Just like I previously mentioned, programming is not an easy task and requires avid enthusiasm and healthy mindset. Naturally, our brain can only perform well if we can keep it calm and relax.

6. 🫂 Loyal partner:
   If the partner is not loyal it even sucks more and you won't be able to focus on your programming career.

7. 🌏 Long distance is even harder to make it work:
   If the relationship is long distance, it is even harder to make it work because you don't know much what the other 10 things are going through and are beyond your access.

8. 🧠 Programmers are logical:
   Sometimes it happens that programmers are extremely logical about relationships. But sometimes you need to keep the logic aside and do what the situation demands. Failing to do that leads to an unhealthy relationship.

9. 😣 Eyes stress:
   Most programmers I personally know face this problem, due to long hours of programming, they get an eye stress and it is hard for them to keep looking on screen. So it is difficult to have a online conversation for them. They actually go to sleep rather than chatting with the partner which actually makes the other person think you don't care them.

10. ❌ No outer world experience:
    Generally due to work from home and programming job, most programmers are behind the four walls alone coding. Due to this they have very less experience with the outer world. In the healthy relationship, what happens is that we basically share about our day, we share about what we did all the day but for programmers, it is just saying "I did work all day!" and that's it!

I am sure not all of the readers of this post will agree on what I mentioned above and that's okay because everyone has a different experience and opinion based on what they went through. There are actually many ways to overcome the above issues too. The motivation behind writing this post is a little bit of experience of myself, little of observation, and more to write things coming straight from the heart.

One tech guy once said that life, career, relationships, health are like the glass balls but the career is a rubber ball. If the career falls, it can still bounce back and get the same momentum but other balls, if they break, can break you internally too 💔.

Of course, investing in right person is always the best thing you can do - give your 100%. But if it is not worth it try to stray away from it ✋.

Also let me know in the comments below about all the experiences you had and how you are managing this crucial dimension of life.