Men Who Tell Me They Are Smarter Than Me

I have tried various different bios for my now defunct dating profiles. One of them mentioned my love for Theodor Adorno (a German philosopher) and Kandinsky (whose work I often echo in my own yarn art). One man responded to this bio by telling me that Adorno was just a reworking of Marx, and even Marx wasn’t that great. He also informed me that Kandinsky was inferior and suggested an artist he thought was better. What do you think a woman’s response to this man would be? Would it be amazed adoration that he even knew (possibly) the somewhat obscure artists she was referencing? Well, if that is what he imagined, that was not what I felt. I didn’t feel thrilled that he was offering me better information than I currently had. I felt annoyed that he bothered to interact with a total stranger online by telling her that he was smarter than she was.

I’ve spent most of my life hiding my various accomplishments. Yes, in part because they were off-putting to men I was trying to date in my younger years. I told myself that I did it later because I was afraid that people would think I was arrogant or would be afraid to talk to me if they didn’t sound smart enough. For instance, I would try to keep track of which woman in my neighborhood knew which of my impressive accomplishments (PhD from Princeton at age 24; nationally ranked triathlete and Ironman athlete, nationally bestselling author) and to make sure she didn’t find out any of the others. I felt like it was my job to hide my intelligence to make others more comfortable.

I can’t tell you how many men in my church have told me they know more than I do. One man insisted, when I answered a question in Sunday School class, that it was King Charles III who was King of England during the American Revolution, after I correctly said that it was George III (Charles III was not yet actually King during this time). Many men naturally assumed that they knew more about the church and scriptures and the history of the church than I did. It was frustrating, but mostly I shrugged and put up with it and didn’t argue back because it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t try to remind them that I had a PhD from Princeton and perhaps they would be better off not to dismiss me. Reading Rebecca Solnit’s essay about men who explain her own expert subject matter to her, sometimes even quoting her own articles to her, is amusing and validating because yes, I’ve had that experience, too.

I don’t expect to be an expert in everything. I’m well aware of many blind spots and I find that people who are actually smarter than me are people who know where they are smarter than me and where they are not smarter than me. With these people, I have an easy relationship where they defer to me naturally in my expert subject areas and I do the same for them. It’s not a contest when I’m talking to them. It’s only a contest when talking to people who seem to have little understanding of the enormity of the world’s knowledge and how impossible it is for any one person to have a grasp of anything other than a tiny portion of it. Rather, these are people who seem to think that whatever they learned in elementary school about all the topics on the planet is all that is necessary to be an “expert.”

My point is that I still encounter men who need to prove their masculinity by making me smaller than them. Really, the reverse is true. Being an ugly bully who thinks that he has to know everything about everything is actually painfully stupid and ridiculous. But it’s not me who is making you look badly. You’re doing it to yourself.

And lastly, this is not about a snobbish insistence that you have to have degrees from certain universities in order for me to rely on your competence. It has nothing to do with certification. I don’t look at other people/men as if I expect them to compete with me. I find people interesting based on criteria other than their education level or their accomplishments. I want to see how their minds work, and I know after all these decades that there are interesting, compassionate, courageous people in all walks of life. I don’t think I’m the person doing the discriminating. But I can’t stop men from trying to compete with me and to insist that I have to be smaller in ways that aren’t physical in order to be of interest to them. I’ve been to this rodeo before.