Olorin
Posts: 8
Joined: 3/10/2007 Status: offline
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Allow me to be contrarian here - a role that I tend to relish. I'm a straight male - I can't speak to the preferences of anyone other than hetero- or bisexual women - but my experience has been that intelligence and intellect are a lot less interesting to a typical woman than is usually implied in polite company. I don't mean to imply its about looks - my hunch is its about attitude and personality above all - but the vast majority of women don't care about intelligence over and above a certain threshold. There are exceptions, of course, and these are the exceptionally intelligent (at the risk of sounding arrogant, I am exceptionally intelligent) who are simply so gifted as to rarely find someone who is a match. For those women, being able to be themselves around me without fearing they might intimidate me was a factor; but in in 15 + years, I've maybe met five or so women who said my intelligence was, in itself, attractive. Or to put it another way: as I told a female friend of mine recently, I know for a fact intelligence isn't the main thing women in general look for because I don't have women throwing themselves at me on a daily basis. Not like I'm bitter or anything.... Yes. Let me forestall any replies along the lines of "Well, with that attitude, no wonder women don't dig you" or "Sounds to me your problem is your arrogance is a turn-off." I assure you I wasn't born arrogant or pessimistic - these are qualities that have been cultivated and encouraged (one might even say "festered") over quite a bit of time. I was quirky, odd, unusual, different, shy, through high school and college and grad school, I was a sweet guy, a nice guy, always been attentive and pleasant... etc... in other words, I was insecure and a pushover. And those two facts about me were far greater liabilities than being nice, and sweet, and smart, were assets. (I might add, an unbroken stretch of rejection all through highschool and into my junior year of college did nothing to encourage me to self-confidence. "Smart is sexy"? Don't make me laugh....) These days I consider myself a "recovering nice guy." In my milder moments, I'm a "sweet bad boy." And, miracle of miracles, my success with women has gone up significantly. Yes, I'm sure being intelligent enough to hold a conversation with anyone I meet is an asset, insofar as its nice to be able to have a conversation instead of watching the game on tv. But as a general rule, the only people who can tell that I'm "a LOT smarter than average" rather than just "smarter than average" are quite frankly a lot smarter than average themselves; I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that "smart is sexy" actually paid off for me. So yeah. I take "I find intelligence attractive" to mean "I want a guy at least as smart as me, but as long as thats the case, I want everything else; I don't necessarily need him to be any smarter than that." And you know what? I'm perfectly content with that: I won't go out with a woman who isn't below a minimum level of physical attraction. Same difference. But on behalf of a lot of smart guys in my life I've known, I'ld like to take this opportunity to disabuse the general population of the mistaken assumption that intelligence is, in itself, a feature that women in general will key on to as a matter of attraction. Real life is not an after-school special.
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