Men, engines, romance and female emancipation
All my girlfriends studying Mathematics with me at the university have officially got married… with an engineer. The pair (math girl, engineer guy) seems to work pretty well, even beyond my restricted group of friends. The girl knows the theory, the guy brings the practice. The continuous mapping between theory and practice not only makes the entire work of Immanuel Kant completely useless (engineers were not “invented” at his time yet), but it makes dealing with day-to-day chores and life duties pretty smooth and effective.
Photo by Amy Schamplen
Let’s be honest: engineers are not known to be the most passionate and romantic males out there and, when they are in their twenties, this might be the type of guys women tend to dismiss. However, as they approach their thirties, women realize that their happiness is tied to having the grass cut in the garden, the trash taken out, the floor cleaned, and the shower sealed regularly with silicone more than they’d like to admit. That is why they ask as wedding gift the latest model of the Dyson vacuum-cleaner (or a super silent Miele washing machine) and marry the ultimate byproduct of the industrial revolution: the engineer man.
Marrying an engineer is of course the easiest way to have someone handy… at hand. Women get their house fixed, engineers get real sex. Fair and simple. Yet, it is not the only way. A possible configuration would be to simply share an apartment with an engineer and benefitting from their ability to use the toolbox without getting into a relationship with them. The latter is what I chose to do.
Photo by Lucan Van Oort
Since I left my parents’ house at 19 years old, I have always lived with an engineer flat mate. At university, I shared my room with a girl studying industrial engineering who implemented a system to drain water from wet boots in the bathroom and showed me how vacuum-cleaners can also be used to kill mosquitos in summer. While doing my PhD, I had the chance to live with a real German mechanical engineer. He sealed the shower, got a better and cheaper Wi-Fi, unclogged the sink and the washing machine filter, hung my pictures with nails and hammer, built an IKEA’s chair for my desk, defrost the freezer, regularly cleaned the boiler from calcar, changed the light bulbs, opened all my jars including nail polish, zipped and unzipped the back of my dresses and the list goes on and on. A real national treasure. When I moved to Switzerland, I sub-rented a room from a police woman with the passion for bricolage and a huge toolbox. To me that qualifies as being an engineer. She built the lamp in the living room, repaired the clothes drying rack, polished the wooden table, sent the robot for vacuum-cleaning back to the producer for reparation and… kicked me out of the flat in the middle of the lockdown because she wanted to live a more “adult life”.
Photo by Jagoda Kondratiuk
Who knew that only living with an engineer without having a relationship with them wasn’t a good long-term strategy for having the house chores taken care of? And more importantly: how was I going to find another engineer to share an apartment with in the middle of a pandemic?
It was at that time that I realized my mistake. I was fooling myself believing that I could outsource house duties to handy flat mates and at the same time continuing having relationships full of passion and romanticism with non-engineer guys. I was wrong, you can never have the best of both worlds, you just can’t. If leading an adult life is about making decision, here is what I needed to choose from: either having more than one sexual intercourse a week besides the one planned between 7:10pm and 7:32pm on Fridays… or living in a home that would likely soon become a pre-industrial apartment with no electricity nor running water.
Photo by Mick Haupt
Despite having empirical evidence that engineer men make math girls happy, I decided to challenge statistics and brought back Kant in the Western cultural scene: I rented an apartment all by myself! Yep, I dared to say “nope” to the “engine” in the same way people say “no” to sweat in deodorant commercials and let my highly theoretical and clumsy spirit walk around freely in a 54 m2 apartment.
Fast forward one and a half year, I still don’t have lamps, nor a vacuum-cleaner or a boiler. I had short circuits almost every day for three months before realizing that some silicone was needed around the sink. And I still walk around the supermarket like a heroin addicted stopping people to ask what is the right light bulb for a “normal lamp in a normal flat”. But hey, who said that the journey to emancipation was easy?
Breaking Thirty Quote
Now I want to hear from you. How come you manage to live without an engineer? Let me know in the comments below and do not forget to subscribe to the Breaking Thirty Newsletter for more insightful blog posts on how not to change a light bulb!