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I don't know, a bit of naivety in a girl is cute... but being able to keep up intellectually, and even contribute to an intellectual conversation, is beautiful.
A fresh and youthful attitude is lovely and joyous. Is that what people mean by retarded, do you think? What, do you have to be jaded and brooding to be intelligent?
Well, whatever. I’m in agreement with you in any case.
The best partner is both, imo. Half my jokes are silly stupid nonsense (I can't even count the number of times my wife and I have accused each other of being a "Sneef Snorf") and the other half are clever and elaborate constructions designed to sound like something reasonable and/or intelligent until they think about it for several moments and untangle the hidden meaning: which turns out to be silly stupid nonsense. I once wrote a two page short story with seemingly arbitrary fantasy and fairy tale features all to build up to the conclusion which was a sentence consisting of weird typos my wife (then girlfriend) had sent me while drunk the previous night.
I suppose someone less intelligent could still have appreciated the goof, but probably not to the same extent. Or wouldn't have taken the teasing in as much fun, as part of the embarrassment at her misspelling is because she ordinarily spells things correctly while sober. And someone less intelligent probably wouldn't have been able to respond to my hack MSPaint "photoshops" of our cat's head onto movie characters with an even higher quality photoshop of her own. And someone who took themselves seriously just wouldn't have appreciated the goofs at all.
You need both.
I still don’t get it. That sounds like regular silliness to me, not idiocy. Intelligence doesn’t preclude goofiness; good comics tend to be pretty bright, because they need to put their finger on the audience’s pulse.
But people seem to be talking, sometimes, about feeling attracted to “tee hee math is hard” kind of nonsense. And I don’t get it.
My guess is that they're being attracted to the silliness part of it and attributing the lack of intelligence as a cause of the silliness. Which potentially has some merit: I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average. I could be wrong, some people do just want to be way smarter than their partner, as some combination of pride and the ability to win arguments and control things, but I think most of it is correlations and stereotypes connecting intelligence to other things. If I had to choose between an intelligent bitter feminist constantly comparing everything I do to a historical dictator, and a sweet highschool dropout country girl with rocks for brains and a heart of gold, I'd choose the latter. If for some reason I was convinced that intelligence inevitably produced the former and wasn't aware of the exceptions I would have been tempted to join more unintellectual activities to try to find unintelligent women. Or just despaired and given up because I don't think they would like me even if I did like them.
The point being, I think some men do think this way. And I think statistically they're partially correct but missing plenty of exceptions.
I disagree, particularly if we’re talking about verbal intelligence. The silliest people I know are highly intelligent, and they love to riff on things in goofy and ridiculous ways, yet surprisingly insightfully. It’s actually not-very-bright people who are most resistant to silly wordplay — they don’t get it!
I remember the first day I went to a gifted education program, which had an IQ cutoff, and the thing that stood out to me was that I finally met people who made silly jokes and found my silly jokes funny.
I think if we sat for IQ tests I would score higher than my girlfriend, but she’s also probably the smartest person I’ve dated and she’s sharp and analytical. Regardless, she’s definitely the silliest. I have a text file where I write down many of the silly things she says because I find them so hilarious. I was going to share these for Friday fun anyway, so here’s some choice selections:
(apparently this was a real story)
(It was in fact a good documentary about mycelium.)
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I’m not personally sold on the correlation myself. Plenty of dumb harpies out there. Meanwhile, the smart women I know (NOT identical to academics) are generally pretty nice, including to me, a man.
Now, what I do see a correlation on is deference. A smart woman is more likely to challenge you on things and assert her own opinion, and less likely to take what you say at face value, holding kindness constant. This is simply because they’re more capable of going toe to toe on the details on account of their intelligence. So if you say something stupid, a smart woman will call you out, possibly nicely, but certainly accurately. And she’ll bring receipts. So for a man who likes to impress his woman (all men), this can be a bit of a challenge. Does she still like me and look up to me? Chances are yes, but it’s something a little galling. It’s like a man doing better with a child or animal - a sort of personalized, gendered insult.
So maybe that’s where it comes from. For me, dumb is such a dealbreaker that I can’t really look past it. But attraction is one of those things where people can never really see eye to eye, and I guess that’s a good thing in itself.
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