There are many ways to be smart

On multiple intelligences, attraction, elitism, and your brilliant brain

I minored in psychology when I went to journalism school, and while those teachings have been hugely helpful to me in my career (dissecting research studies, understanding psychosexual phenomena, etc.), they’ve perhaps been even more useful to me in my personal life.

I remember sitting in the back of a lecture hall one sleepy morning, having chosen that far-away seat on purpose so the professor wouldn’t see me scrolling through Reddit or Twitter. (Bad girl.) I looked up mid-lecture to find that the instructor was explaining the theory of multiple intelligences. My eyes widened and I switched tabs to my note-taking app, suddenly desperate to absorb what was being taught.

What I didn’t appreciate, at the time, was that this professor had a pretty leftist, intersectional, progressive view of what intelligence is and how it functions. I’d just thought she was lecturing about boring brain stuff (god, if I ever have to hear another goddamn explanation of what the amygdala does…), but I realized in that moment that she was imparting something much more useful: an entirely new way of thinking about a trait I considered of utmost importance.

See, I’d always been one of those snobs who prefers to date smart people, whatever the hell that even means. I even identified as sapiosexual for a time, which I now understand is a weirdly appropriative term that misidentifies an elitist, often classist and racist preference as a sexual orientation. But I’d had reason to question the simplicity of that viewpoint in recent years. For instance, I’d dated a few people in high school who had various combinations of ADD, ADHD, autism, and dyslexia, so I’d come to understand (far too late; mea culpa) that misspelled texts and showing up late to dates did not necessarily mean a person lacked intelligence or respectfulness. But I did not have a concrete, scientific way of thinking about this revelation until that lecture on multiple intelligences.

There is some debate about whether this theory holds water, but it’s one of those things that seems so obvious to me, it almost doesn’t need to be studied. We all know people who are super smart in certain areas and less so in other areas. In fact, I’d guess that we all are people like that. I’m a good writer and ukulele player, for example, who can’t cook, do sports, or play guitar to save her life. I can do long division but not calculus or my taxes. I can string together a sentence but will collapse into tears on the floor when tasked with building a dresser from IKEA. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses, and I think many of those strengths (if not all of them) are types of intelligence.

Beyond making me less of an elitist asshole, this concept has also revolutionized my dating life, making it more joyful and pleasurable. Once you understand that there are infinite ways to be clever, you start noticing all those various manifestations in everyone you meet. I am absolutely floored by social intelligence now in ways I never used to be, for example, because I can see it for the particular genius that it is. I’m also amazed at the oratory intelligence of comedy-show emcees, the sexual intelligence of athletic porn stars, the emotional intelligence of empathetic therapists. I screech over concert pianists and gawk at tennis stars in awe. The misrepresentation of some of these abilities as simply mechanical skills or a “knack” is reductive; all of these skills come from a place in the brain, too, and involve specific types of intelligence that had to be developed and sharpened. And all of these intelligences are hot as fuck.

I’m deeply remorseful about all the times I prized certain forms of intelligence over others, and I wish that everyone with types of intelligence deemed non-standard could understand just how brilliant they truly are. But the best I can really do is move forward trying to help everyone see their own unique genius through fresh eyes. It’s easy to think of your own aptitudes as “not a big deal” because, to you, they’re old hat – but almost no one has your specific set of intelligences, and there are tons of people out there who wish they were gifted in the way(s) that you are.

This is one of the (many) reasons I no longer believe in the concept of “objective attractiveness.” No one is out of anyone else’s “league,” no one is an objective “10” or an objective “2,” no one is “universally” hot, because we’re all into different things and we’re all dazzling in different ways. I know that sounds cheesy but it’s true.

So as we walk through this life, let’s try our best not to devalue types of intelligence that society already devalues – whether other people’s, or our own.