I Love Smart Women
I think it's nice when a woman IS highly intelligent but not if she's constantly BEING highly intelligent. I've always preferred women at least as intelligent as I and they weren't that hard to find :-). After all, 6 years on campus doing a BA and MA and one tends to get a lot of opportunities to meet educated women while there - especially if you stick to activities that attract intelligent people (such as editing the University's literary magazine while others were off doing more "party" things). That said, there's one woman I went out with a couple of times where it was just too much. She asked me out and I was just bowled over that she would. She was drop dead gorgeous, highly intelligent (double majoring and excelling in Literature and Law in 2 different languages while her native tongue was a 3rd language) and very sweet. The problem was EVERYTHING was intellectual with her. Whatever the subject was it was bound to quickly find its way into a comparison to some escoteric practice in medieval times or a reference to a little known piece of literature. It wasn't that I wasn't able to keep up - I could. But that was the sensation I had - constantly keeping up and having to be clever and it was quite exhausting. Perhaps it was a little intimidating for me, I'll admit. But it wasn't something i couldn't handle - the real question was whether "handling" was what I wanted in a relationship. To paraphrase Billy Joel (Just the way you are) I often like clever conversations but don't always want to work that hard, I just want someone I can talk to"!
In retrospect I don't know if she was that way with other guys. I had a fairly good reputation for intelligence around the department and perhaps she was pulling out all she had in order to try and look uberintellectual for me. My point is that if a woman is intelligent even if she's incredibly intelligent she doesn't have to be intellectual the whole time. It's ok to just relax and have fun without being clever the entire time. Once we know you're intelligent you don't have to keep proving it - we're with you because we respect you for who you are and enjoy your intelloigence as part of that. We won't think less of you even if an entire 10 minutes goes by without a detailed analysis of how the Faerie Queene might be different had it ben written by a 19th century geneticist :-).
There are certainly times to be clever and times for deep conversation - but there are also times for just relaxing one's mind and enjoying each other's company without the clever conversation.
