I have a mini-confession to make: I wrote the Tao of Dating books specifically for really smart people. The writing of the books was precipitated by the endemic dating woes on the Harvard campus, as I observed them as an advisor and earlier, indulged in them as a student.
Those kids graduate and pretty much continue to have the same dating woes -- only now with fewer single people around who happen to live in the same building and share meals with them every day. So if they had challenges then, it gets about 1000 times worse once they're tossed from the warm womb of their alma mater.
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.
On the one hand, this makes no sense. Smart people can figure stuff out, right? And this stuff is simple!
On the other hand, it makes total sense. For simple things, it takes someone smart to really screw it up. So whether you went (or should have gone) to the likes of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Swarthmore, Amherst, Dartmouth, Brown, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, Penn, Caltech, Duke, read on:
1. Smart people spent more time on achievements than on relationships when growing up.
Smart kids usually come from smart families. And smart families are usually achievement-oriented. Bring me home those straight As, son. Get into those top colleges, daughter. Take piano, violin, tennis, swimming and Tibetan throat-singing lessons. Win every award there is in the book. Be 'well-rounded.'
Well, you're a talented little bugger. Of course you should develop those talents. At the same time, there's an opportunity cost associated with achievement. Time spent studying, doing homework, and practicing the violin is time not spent doing other things -- like chasing boys or girls, which turns out is fairly instrumental in making you a well-rounded human.
The upshot of all that achievement is that you get into a top college -- congratulations! -- and then continue doing even more of what you were doing before. Dating is at best another extracurricular, #6 or #7 down the list, somewhere between Model UN and intramural badminton.
I've been co-hosting young alumni events for name-brand schools for long enough to know that these kids come out a little lopsided (which sounds so much better than 'socially awkward', don't you think?). All they need is a little tune-up, or a little dating textbook like The Tao of Dating for Women or The Tao of Dating for Men, to get them going -- plus a little practice.
Of course, as noted above, things only get worse once you graduate. And if you're frustrated with your love life, you just might try to compensate by working harder and achieving even more to fill that void. Left untreated, this condition can go on for decades. I know people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond who still haven't figured out how to create an intimate connection with another human being.
It's because they've been going at it the wrong way. Which brings us to...
2. Smart people feel that they're entitled to love because of their achievements.
For most of their lives, smart people inhabit a seemingly meritocratic universe: if they work hard, they get good results (or, in the case of really smart folks, even if they don't work hard, they still get good results). Good results mean kudos, strokes, positive reinforcement, respect from peers, love from parents.
So it only makes sense that in the romantic arena, it should work the same way. Right? The more stuff I do, the more accomplishments and awards I have, the more girls (or boys) will like me. Right? Please say I'm right, because I've spent a LOT of time and energy accumulating this mental jewelry, and I'm going to be really bummed if you tell me it's not going to get me laid.
Well, it's not going to get you laid, brother (or sister). It may get you a first date, but it's probably not going to get you a second date. And it certainly won't bring you lasting love and fulfillment.
Here's the thing: your romantic success has nothing to do with your mental jewelry and everything to do with how you make the other person feel. And making someone feel a certain way is a somewhat nonlinear process that requires a different kind of mastery than that of calculus or Shakespeare.
In other words, you need to earn love (or at least lust). Sadly, no mom, dad or professor teaches us about the power of the well-placed compliment (or put-down), giving attention but not too much attention, being caring without being needy. I wrote a whole 280-page book about that, so that's a story for a different day.
3. You don't feel like a fully-realized sexual being, and therefore don't act like one.
At some point in your life, you got pegged as a smart person. From then on, that was your principal identity: The Smart One. Especially if you had a sibling who was better-looking than you, in which case she (or he) was The Pretty One.
Now you could be absolutely stunning (in which case you're both smart AND pretty and everyone hates you except for me -- call me, like, immediately), but your identity is still bound up in being The Smart One. So maybe you dress frumpy and don't pay a lot of attention to your appearance. Or never bothered to cultivate your sensuality as a woman. Or your sexual aggression as a male.
Attracting a partner is all about the dance of polarity. Energy flows between positive and negative electrodes, anode and cathode, magnetic north and south. Unless you actually convey femininity as a woman or masculinity as a man, you're not going to attract a suitable companion of the opposite sex.
Part of the issue is this: when all of your personal energy is concentrated in the head, it never gets a chance to trickle down to the heart, or, god forbid, the groin. By virtue of being born of the union of male and female, yang and yin, you are a sexual being. Deal with it. Now do what you need to do to perpetuate the race already. Use what mama amoeba gave you.
That brings us to...
4. You're exceptionally talented at getting in the way of your own romantic success.
Here's an incontrovertible fact: every one of your ancestors survived to reproductive age and got it on at least once with a member of the opposite sex. All the way back to Homo erectus. And even further back to Australopithecus. And even further back to monkeys, to lizards, to the first amphibian that crawled out of the slime, the fish that preceded that amphibian, the worm before the fish and the amoeba that preceded the worm.
And you, YOU, in the year 2009 C.E., the culmination of that miraculously unbroken line of succession, you, Homo sapiens sapiens, not just thinking man but thinking thinking man (or woman), are the only one smart enough to screw the whole thing up.
Perhaps you should consider thinking a little less then.
Because heaven knows that the amoeba, worm, fish, amphibian, monkey and primitive hominids didn't do a whole lot of thinking. Their DNA had a vested interest in perpetuating itself, so it made sure that happened.
Turns out your DNA works the same way, too. And maybe when you're really sloshed at a party and your whole frontal lobe is on vacation in the outer rings of Saturn, you've noticed that your lizard brain knows exactly how to grab that cute girl by the waist for a twirl on the dance floor. Or knows exactly how to arch your back, flip your hair and glance at that handsome hunk just so such that he comes on over to say hi.
To put it plainly, you are programmed to reproduce. Now quit thinking you're smarter than the 3 billion base pairs in your genome and 4 billion years of evolution. Actually, just stop thinking altogether. Let the program do its work.
5. By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect
Let's say by 'smart' we mean 'in the top 5% of the population in terms of intelligence and education'. Generally speaking, smart people seek out other smart people to hang out with, simply because they get bored otherwise. And if they're going to spend a lot of time with someone, intelligence in a partner is pretty much a requirement.
Well, congratulations -- you've just eliminated 95% of the world's population as a potential mate, Mr or Ms Smartypants. Now, luckily, the world's kinda big, so the remaining 5% of the gender of your choice is still a plentiful 160 million or so people. Even if only 1% of those are single enough, good-looking enough, local enough and just all-around cool enough for you, that's over a million people you can date out there.
Still, that's less than one in five thousand people. And if you live in a smaller city, it may be just a handful of folks who are going to meet your stringent criteria.
At this point, you have three choices:
A) Loosen up
B) Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Duesseldorf OR
C) Join a monastery.
My hearty recommendation is choice A. The purpose of relationship (and perhaps all of life) is to practice the loving. No partner is going to be 100% perfect anyway, so learn to appreciate people for what they have to offer, not what they don't. And love them for that. That's what real loving is.
Nobody's asking to lower your standards here; you should still spend time only with worthwhile company. But do question the standards to see whether they're serving you or you're serving them.
When you open your heart to love, you may find fulfillment in ways you never imagined possible -- like the day you tried sushi or beer in spite of your trepidation, found it surprisingly alright, and expanded your personal envelope of pleasure. Taking that into consideration, given a choice between happy-go-lucky and picky-but-lonely, happy sounds like more fun.
For more dating advice for smart people, consult the Tao of Dating for Women book & Tao of Dating for Men
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Write to me at dralex(at)taoofdating.com
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(2) "Smart" people that make it to big name schools tend to be people that are really obnoxious to be around, with the exception being those that are really intelligent and don't really need the brand to feel confident. They are really good at working the academic system but they a terrible attitude.
My point is that people that you identify as "smart" fail in relationships for the same reason that everyone else does. They probably are terrible listeners and they lack the compassion to understand others.
People don't like being around people that make them feel bad. If "smart" people spend less time talking about their achievements and spend more time asking others about their interests, then they might find that there are more people to like in the world.
Not all "smart" people end up alone. A lot of them find someone to love and love them in return.
Intelligence is not hindering people from building meaningful relationships, arrogance is.
Of course these days, in modern society, being totally obsessed with numbers and letters is a pathway to finacial success, unlike it was for most of human history where focusing on how everything was orderly would mean that the wolves and hyenas ate your flocks and family.
Now of course it's the other way around. Those who don't focus on these linear/order aspects very well because they're so tuned into anything new that enters their field of awareness become loosers for the most part and are relegated to manual labor where mental focus of the linear kind is not so important...
So now the "focused" are being successfull, meeting others like them instead of being relegated to some dark dungeon to count beans, and they're having kids, in whom (no surprise) we are seeing an amplification of this type of mentality.
Many that are having difficulty dating are actually just having diffiiculty finding enough similarly enabled linear thinkers, but as the geek nation rises, soon there will be social structures suited to them...mostly in cyberspace, I'd guess.
Me...I think I see a coyote!
"Not every man that we women are concerned about is sincere in their concern for us women."
I think smart women sometimes fall easily for men who show concern for women. Above quote might help to see beyond a show of concern.
If you read a book, you're the same person just more well-read / intellegent
If you exercise, you're the same person just more fit
If you drink, you're the same person just inebriated
If you try to improve yourself socially, you're 'not being yourself'
I'm a little confused
Nature is NOT concerned about what's in your personal best interest and doesn't give a damn about your personal happiness. You, however, should be most definitely concerned about that, which means the hind-brain HAS to take a back seat to the rational part of the brain. Which means you *don't* screw anything that moves but rather must take a more sensible approach to dating and mating. All of which still doesn't tell really smart people anything useful about how to find a suitable date or mate, other than to be selective and always use protection (only wise given the public health epidemic on STDs and AIDS-HIV). So what good are you, Benzer??
Chronic fear is what fuels this fictional fearlessness.
Alvy Singer: Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger: Yeah.
Alvy Singer: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I'm exactly the same way.
Alvy Singer: I see. Wow. That's very interesting. So you've managed to work out something?
It also tends to result in an aversion to the conversational inanities of the general population. Discussing the latest activities of some actor or actress just isn't your thing when you would rather be debating politics or some other more intellectual topic. To smart people, the world can often times seem like a production of No Exit. That is, where hell becomes defined as being endlessly surrounded by cretins prattling on about topics of no import whatsoever.
The real zinger here: if a woman knows her worth and lets on that she knows it, she scares the hell out of guys. Particularly if she's more confident than the guys are. And I'm not interested in playing stupid or letting him think it's all about him, because it isn't (it isn't all about me, either; sometimes, the world is really about the rest of the world, not either of *us*).
Yes, it's true that men are better about women being their equals than they were 20 or 30 years ago; but many men still prefer to be just a little more equal than she is, whether in brains, jobs, talents, or money. Even very smart men want a woman who's smart enough to have that advanced degree and decent earning ability yet still somehow not quite smart enough to see through him. So: smart men can settle for lesser women, especially if they look like supermodels, and smart women are supposed to put up with that? No thanks! And don't tell me to loosen my intellectual criteria: I've tried dating down, and it just doesn't work.
Conclusion: even smart men still aren't as evolved as they should be. Which leaves many smart women between a rock and a hard place.
You are right that life is bigger then you, so you should be able to see that lots of people have qualities that you can admire as they serve humanity, rather than your inflated ego.