Amerika

Hypothesis: smarter people spend more time on improving competence than socialization, believing that socialization is a means to the end of accomplishing collective tasks and not necessarily worth doing as an activity for its own sake. However, over time smarter people learn socialization is a form of communication and not an activity, and can address it in that context.

From my observations, the following dating challenges seem to be common to most smart people. In fact, the smarter you are, the more clueless you will be, and the more problems you’re going to have in your dating life. Once upon a day I used to be pretty smart, and believe me, I had a lock on clueless.

For simple things, it takes someone smart to really screw it up.

1. Smart people spent more time on achievements than on relationships when growing up.

( Translation: you’re geared toward results, not making people feel good. )

2. Smart people feel that they’re entitled to love because of their achievements.

( Translation: you think others will love you for your achievements. )

3. You don’t feel like a fully-realized sexual being, and therefore don’t act like one.

( Translation: you’re inexperienced in sex, and looking for more than just sexual attraction. )

4. You’re exceptionally talented at getting in the way of your own romantic success.

( Translation: you overthink something that does not reward analysis; it’s biological and innate. )

5. By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet’s inhabitants as a dating prospect

( Translation: you’re trying to meet that rare needle in a haystack smart person. )

HuffPost

Like most people marketing books on relationships, Dr. Benzer is really writing about sex, but he hits on some vital difficulties for smart people: finding other smart people, recognizing the personality and not the role, and then not overthinking the process of attraction.

But what he fails to realize is that for smart people, attraction is presupposed to lead to something else: a longer-term commitment, probably marriage and family. Why else would you bother? To someone with intelligence and achievements, sex alone isn’t pleasurable enough to be a motivator.

One of the biggest problems our society faces is that the smart people are in the minority, and they find it increasingly hard to find and connect with mates during their years of fertility.

As one analyst writes:

Any endogamous population will produce a few relatively smart people, a few relatively dull people, and mostly inbetweens. If you want more smart people, and for the dull people to be less dull (the two changes go together), there is only one way to do it: raise the average. For any trait whose variance is largely the result of many genes, the only way to change it is to change the level of the average person.

EL

What he/she is talking about here is the standard distribution: “mostly inbetweens,” a few smart and a few dull.

The distribution occurs modally, or relative to a starting point; if that starting point (“average”) is higher, the dulls are less dull and the smarts and inbetweens are smarter.

The only way to raise that average is to create more of the smart and to nurture them toward positions of importance, so others emulate them and want to adopt their traits.