Feeling love and being loved is a human need. But the search for it can be an immense challenge, especially for highly intelligent people.
The search for love can be a grueling journey and, despite your best efforts, can be unsuccessful for a long time. What doesn’t necessarily make this any easier – perhaps surprisingly for some – is intelligence. While generally a highly valued quality, it can sometimes pose a major challenge to romantic relationships.
Especially highly intelligent people with strong cognitive abilities and an analytical mindset can find it difficult to navigate a very abstract area like love and all the emotions that come with it. But if you understand the often complex reasons why some “matters of the heart” are more difficult to manage, you have the chance to have a positive influence on your love life – and maybe find and keep true love after all.
4 reasons why highly intelligent people have a hard time finding love
Special interests, the demand for emotional maturity or even external social pressure: intelligent people have no shortage of reasons why the search for love feels so difficult. We present a few.
They lack common interests in their counterparts
In his article on “Psychology Today” therapist Dr. Stephen J. Betchen said: “When two people have the same or similar interests, life as a couple is easier.” It would be even better if they both had a passion for a specific area, something that would connect them for years, says the scientist. It doesn’t even have to be something active: Years ago, Betchen met a man who had lived in a house in the mountains with his wife for 50 years and felt “blessed” – they both shared their passion for their home.
However, it is problematic when there is a lack of common interests, hobbies and passions. Highly intelligent people often have unique perspectives on life and great intellectual curiosity. Wonderful qualities, but not everyone shares them. It can be difficult for them to find people who have similar or even the same views as them, or who are interested in similar – sometimes perhaps obscure – things.
Need for emotional maturity
Emotional maturity means a variety of characteristics: It describes a person who knows exactly who they are. A person who exudes a feeling of “calm in the storm,” as the health magazine “Healthline” puts it. We would turn to them if we were going through a difficult time because we know that they can deal with stress in a healthy way. You take responsibility when something goes wrong and don’t shift it onto others. They are empathetic without getting lost in the emotions of their counterparts and are not afraid of showing (perceived) weaknesses.
Anyone who has a healthy relationship will sooner or later show a very emotionally vulnerable side. Intelligent people are aware of this fact and often have certain expectations of their partner in terms of emotional maturity. Who wants to have to teach the other person that emotional vulnerability and openness are important? But on the other hand, having a highly intelligent person as a partner is anything but easy: This type of person in particular often has a rather withdrawn nature, tends to brood and over-analyze – this can be challenging to meet at all on an emotional level.
The desire for intellectual stimulation
Not every conversation has to go into the depths of the Mariana Trench – but like one study shows, intelligent people thrive best when they can communicate and are intellectually stimulated. Conversely, this leads to them suffering if they do not feel intellectually satisfied by their partner.
We tend to look for relationship partners with whom we feel on the same level in terms of intellect. The problem for particularly intelligent people is then to find a person who can hold a candle to them. What only makes the search more difficult is that other characteristics are of course important for love (or even the mere interest and the chance of a relationship). A combination of all of these is not easy to find.
Social pressure is on them
In our culture, it is normal for people to long for romantic love and to give this form of affection priority – alongside, for example, love for friends, family, themselves, the world, community and pets – explains psychotherapist Dr . Meg-John Barker in an interview with BBC. In one way or another, we are all affected by “amatonormativity,” i.e. the social idea that every person would want a romantic relationship or even marriage.
But some people just don’t fit this pattern, such as aromatics who don’t experience romantic attraction or people who prefer other types of relationships or many relationships (such as polyamorous people). “It’s difficult for them because the world around them assumes that they only want one type of love and may discriminate against them or make them feel strange or isolated because they are ‘different,'” explains Dr. Barker.
Highly intelligent people are very aware of the norms of our society – and also of the fact that they may not conform to them. It is often clear to them in theory that external influences such as family, friends, social networks and other media are ultimately just that: external influences.
But this rarely helps them overcome the feeling of inadequacy that they have because they do not meet certain social norms – after all, they are reminded almost daily that they are doing something “wrong”. This creates an incredible amount of pressure to find someone – which only makes an already huge challenge even more difficult and turns the search for love into pure stress.
It can be helpful to remember that social norms are more or less arbitrarily set and changeable. We don’t have to prove anything to anyone and we certainly don’t have to enter into relationships because that’s what society expects of us. It is certainly helpful to know possible reasons why finding a partner is challenging – but in the end no human being will ever be able to fulfill us as we fulfill ourselves. And so it is up to us to make positive changes in our lives – which may, but does not necessarily, include a relationship.
Sources used: psych2go.net, psychologytoday.com, healthline.com, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, queer-lexikon.net