I had a girlfriend with a CS degree from Princeton. She didn’t care much about code, and didn’t want to talk about it.

Another had an MIS degree. She loved my enthusiasm, but didn’t care much about the content.

Another was a photographer with a tremendous amount of curiosity about everything. She listened raptly for hours at a time to every word I said about every low-level or mathy thing. She took it all in and asked great questions. Then she learned programming and became a software project manager.

I believe the biggest factor in the difference in interest was the “cares about people” vs “cares about phenomena” spectrum.

In general, though, I would never even bring up the topic with friends or girlfriends.

Quite a lot of times, actually. It helps to work in gamedev, but I think a lot of developers can have interesting and meaningful conversations with outsiders about their work if they focus on the domain, things that they are building and problems they're solving, not the inner workings of languages and frameworks.

I love talking to my partner, even though she's got an MBA (and works as an artist. Long story :)

It helps me improve my communication and teaching skills. It's fun, because it highlights the parts I don't clearly understand as well. She cares about it because it's so fundamentally different from anything she does, it's an entirely different world. (Vice versa, too. She's given me beautiful explanations on color theory, for example)

Yes, it requires work, from both sides. But for me personally - if your partner doesn't care enough to ask (or you don't care enough to explain), why have a relationship in the first place?

(Sidebar: s/girlfriend/partner/g, please.)