It’s a well-established stereotype for the big, dumb “jock” to get the girl while the “nerd” with straight A’s ensures his virginity behind an impenetrable wall of lightsabers and Magic: The Gathering card decks.
Sure, many exceptions exist. Everyone who has seen Oppenheimer (2023) is now painfully aware of the fact that the father of the atomic bomb f**ked more than just Hiroshima and Nagasaki (too soon?). Benjamin Franklin also had a reputation for philandering in France, and he was pretty smart, too.
Still, those smart guys knowing their way around the art of seduction are generally seen as exceptions to the rule, and not the rule itself.
As a men’s dating coach, I have seen all kinds of men struggling with women and dating.
By far, one type of man struggles more than any other: young, highly intelligent men.
It’s because it’s the group with the biggest ego.
If you’re on the older side, you are more likely to have been humbled by a bit of life experience.
If you’re young and smart, it’s more likely that you’re a bit cocky and full of yourself, generally less willing to listen to perspectives that challenge your own.
If you’re smart enough to sling around more advanced vocabulary to make yourself sound superior in any debate, you’re well-armed to defend any self-defense mechanisms that your ego created in order to preserve itself.
You can come up with any and every justifiable reason to stay in your comfort zone despite your lack of real-world results.
The field is king.
These smart guys love to think about theories and hypotheticals and devil’s advocate arguments and whatnot. They prefer that kind of mental masturbation over practical experimentation that could potentially prove them wrong.
It’s as if they are mathematicians and philosophers instead of engineers and scientists. All theory, with no practical application.
Dumb guys don’t care about all those thought experiments. They don’t extrapolate defeatist conclusions from anecdotal online messaging like the incels do. They don’t say sh*t like this:
Instead, dumb guys are more likely to actually go out and try sh*t. They get to understand that the field is king, that the lessons gleaned from real life experience trumps any intellectual argument one can make.
They understand that “smart” guys get stuck in their heads way too much, overthinking and catastrophizing to the point of hesitation and outright inaction. They understand that the fears that smart guys build up within themselves are actually unsubstantiated assumptions. They know this because they experienced the real costs and benefits from experience; they don’t care about untested cost-benefit analyses pulled from secondhand observation.
Science can save you.
So, if you’re a smart guy who has a hard time getting girls, how can you harness the power of your “dumb” side in order to become more successful in your love life?
The answer:
Embrace the humility of the scientific method.
Do not allow yourself to fall victim to confirmation bias when it comes to your already-established views on women and dating.
Do not allow your hypotheses to become conclusions without trials that involve representative sample sizes that are randomized and statistically significant.
However, you can’t just rely on a meta-analysis of other people’s anecdotal data points. You need to get out there and replicate the experiments yourself.
Replicate the stuff I’ve tried. Try the stuff on more than 30 (the commonly accepted minimum sample size in science) women from various backgrounds, face-to-face in real life. Tweak the independent variables that you begin to identify through experimentation.
Do this, and you will start noticing yourself developing a different kind of intelligence, one far more useful in social interactions and relationships.
Have you noticed any other ways smart guys tend to get in their own way?
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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.
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