"He's just sooooo insanely smart that he doesn't have patience for my feelings."
I've heard this a shocking number of times, almost invariably from a smart-as-fuck person who's convinced that emotional stuntedness is a byproduct of hyperintelligence. Typically, this person also worries that their emotions are proof that they, personally, are stupid. Too stupid, in other words, to stop feeling their emotions and have real Smart Person conversations, with all those Very Smart People whose proof of intelligence is that they flunked Human Contact 101.
I have also known a number of Very Smart People myself—in part because insecure "intellectual" men are drawn to me like sullen little moths to a flame. These folks are typically just bright enough not to insist to my face that they're too smart to have emotions. And sure enough, the one trait these kinds of people have in common is that they are all insanely emotionally thin-skinned. They are so rational that, if you hurt their feelings even a vewy widdle bit, they'll need to spend the next 90 minutes of your life talking your ear off about how them not knowing how to stop talking about this is super logical, actually, it isn't emotional at all, maybe you're the emotional one, did you even readKierkegaard, do you even have a STEM degree, yadda yadda yadda yadda.
These people think that what they have in common is some kind of cerebral backbone: they're lawyers or debate-team alumni, maybe, or they're engineers of some sort, or they have a thorough grounding in philosophy or literature or what-have-you. What they actually have in common is a life path that conveniently ignored every possible moment that would've asked them to get along with another human being for more than thirty seconds at a time. They're convinced that their inability to basic healthy connections is proof of their superiority, the limitations of their so-called peers, when in fact it's a glaring defect. It's such a shocking idiocy on their parts that it's almost impossible to believe.
A lot of people buy into these folks' unearned superiority complexes, in fact, precisely because it's damn hard to imagine that someone could be that fucking stupid. But they can be. And once you realize that, you'll be shocked at how many "intelligent-presenting" people lack even the most rudimentary ability to decipher emotion as a type of language, even though it's arguably the fundamental way that we communicate with one another.
Sometimes, these people get credit for their unnerving ability to "outmaneuver" other people's emotions. They get called "disturbingly brilliant sociopaths," though only the latter part of this is right: it doesn't take much intelligence to figure out that, if someone trusts you with their feelings and you aren't trustworthy, it is far easier for you to exhaust them or hurt them or convince them not to argue with you than it will be for them to get you to take their feelings seriously. If you grow up convinced that faith in you is a mark of inferiority, well, you'll wind up preying on a lot of too-kind people while convincing yourself that they're your lessers. And maybe you'll convince them of this too, because when you shit the bed that much, some people will be so taken aback by your feral shitting that they'll tell themselves they must be missing something important. Some people were raised too well, in other words, to recognize that other people were never taught not to shit in their friends' and loved ones' mouths.
Pop culture doesn't make this any easier for us. It looooves brilliant assholes who scorn other people's feelings and get away with it. These people, we invariably learn, have rich inner worlds, and are incredibly interesting, unlike the dullards who they routinely insult and degrade. Typically, this kind of media is written by someone on his fifth marriage, and features a number of "powerful women" who profess to hate assholes but don't know the first thing about how to keep a man. This is what statisticians might call a "known bias."
(It's not just men, to be clear.)
People like this tend to think of conversation as a kind of play. Communication is just a system to understand and master. Every situation has its own series of levers, its own set of moves, and all you have to do is know the right move to make at the right time. You expect people not to take things personally—even if what they're talking about involves their personal life or their personhood. If they come to you with a problem, it's because they're expecting you to solve it. And if you perceive them turning into a problem, it is only appropriate to shut that problem down as swiftly and as effectively as possible.
This is a decent way to think about chess, a delightfully complex game that rewards deep understanding and mastery of a series of static, permanently-fixed pieces. Every chessboard is identical to every other chessboard. Every game begins the same way. No matter how wrecked you are, no matter how much you devastate the other player, nothing is held onto: the board resets itself every time. Who would possibly waste their time thinking about the last game they played, unless it's to devise a way to play better this time around? If someone gets mad at losing five games in a row, they're just being sore. Most importantly of all, once you know the game, you know the whole damn game.There may be surprises in somebody's tactics, but the rules fundamentally never change—and every round opens in the same place.
If you meet someone who treats human connection like it's a game of chess, then you might be impressed by how many different ways they know how to ruin your night. You have spent years and years trying to understand the complex details of various conflicts with various people, learning how to put your destructive impulses to the side, learning how to assume the best of people who you're seeing at their worst, trying to find ways of recognizing others as human even when they're seriously pissing you off. They, on the other hand, have spent those same years learning that... well, that if your goal is just avoidance, coming up with reasons to think that you've "won," and generally denying the possibility that people are trickier than board games, it turns out you can learn a broad variety of party tricks that exhaust people into not putting up a fight. Sure, sometimes those party tricks lead to people refusing to ever talk to you again, but it's easy enough to convince yourself that they're just jealous.
Some people would rather win than be happy. Tragically, they typically think that the only way to be happy is to win. What they're "winning" is unclear—typically it has something to do with "status," a concept that is itself unclear—but if they're not happy, they tell themselves, that just means they need to win harder.
They've got to be real dumbasses to believe this, but at some point, you realize there are entire categories of "smart people" who you can just write off as almost universally really stupid. It's freeing, in its way.
But maybe there's somebody reading this for whom something here rang uncomfortably true. Someone who thinks I'm being hyperbolic and unfair—it's true! I am!—but who's had one too many moments when their "reasonableness" left someone they cared about in tears. This person feels lonelier than they'd like to feel: maybe they seriously struggle to make friends or maintain relationships, but maybe they don't. Maybe they're in a serious relationship, and can't understand why the person they say "I love you" to seems to be so miserable all the time, like they're caught a damp chill mist that only they can see, or else they notice how angry their partner gets, how often they wind up clenching their teeth so hard that their eyes rim red with tears, or else their partner is just increasingly disconnected and cold, increasingly unwilling to even give them a chance, and only says, when asked: It just doesn't feel like anything I say seems to matter. And they refuse to explain it any further.
If this is you—and I'm not saying this is you, but if it is you—then I'd like to gently suggest that there is a way of being human that you haven't quite discovered, one that has a very different set of rules. It's not a hard one to learn, but it does take quite a bit of work to practice. It will probably take some patience. More than patience, it will likely require you to swallow a bit of pride—and you likely know that that's more painful than you want to admit.
A part of you will get frustrated. A part of you will shout that this feels like an indignity. You might get pretty upset that you are being expected to follow somebody else's set of rules, when that person isn't sticking to your idea of good behavior. But I will gently propose, again, that this is worth pursuing just the same. Because whatever hurt that you'll feel will be dwarfed by the magnitude of just how rewarding it is to learn how to deal with feelings. Even the slightest bit of work will yield implausible dividends. And what you'll find, probably sooner than later, is that it's the bits you're the most worried about, the bits that make you bristle the most, that it turns out you have to worry about the least.
Because when you think of conflict as a challenge, when you think of problems as personal failures, and when you define yourself by your ability to "win," then, when someone brings up ways that you make them feel, when someone gets emotional when you're with them, it feels like they're picking a fight. It feels worse than unnecessary—it feels hurtful. And you probably wind up trying to "resolve" things in ways that just make things worse.
But you have to put thoughts of competition out of your head. Some people treat emotions like they're a game of one-upmanship—look for the person who refuses to let you have a feeling of your own without insisting that their feeling matters more—but those people are unhealthy themselves, and should not be your role models here. Most people aren't looking for a fight: they're looking for help. And when you lower your so-called "defenses" and stop trying to exploit openings and score points, you find that what's being asked of you is infinitely less difficult than the game you were so cleverly playing.
Feelings aren't chesslike in the slightest. They're a lot more like Marco Polo, really: one person's calling out, and you're stumbling around in the dark trying to work out where they are. It's a childish game, I know. But that's why even children can learn how to have productive conversations about people's feelings. The hard part has nothing to do with logic or calculation, and everything to do with patience and sensation. You are trying to feel your way towards someone—and wow, gee, maybe that's why we use that word to mean that thing.
It's trickier than you might think. But on the plus side, the person you're with isn't fighting you: they're trying to help you succeed. And that's the real secret difference here: even if you're inexperienced at this, even if you don't have the first fucking clue how to navigate the territory of another person's feelings, the fact that you're trying makes literally 90% of the difference right off the bat. Put in a genuine effort—not a performative effort, the kind where you go through all the motions and say all the magic words but don't actually try to work your way towards an understanding—and you'll be amazed at how little you have to do beyond, well, genuinely trying.
It's crazy. Makes the other way of doing things seem, well, absolutely pointless and inane. (Don't worry: typically people'll be so grateful that you've figured this out too that they won't waste too much time giving you shit for how long it took you to cotton on.)
The word I used up there, when I said that people typically want to help you succeed, is very important. Success is not the same thing as winning. It's not an achievement or a prize. It doesn't prove anything whatsoever. (The idea of proof is so cold, anyway. Plenty of things are too complex to reduce down to simple fact.) If anything, success is a destination: it's something you arrive at. Oftentimes, people will root for you to succeed because they want to meet you there. What you're looking for isn't conquest or victory or triumph, all of which serve to place you not above people but away from them. And what you're doing isn't lowering yourself to anybody, for that matter. It's a matter of near versus far. Finding common ground, learning a way to be together, rather than severing yourself from people you want to be close with.
The reason why so many smart people trick themselves into thinking that someone's "brilliant and detached" rather than "missing a puzzle piece" is that they don't realize not everybody wants success. They typically work their asses off to find that connection, helping out in every way that they see fit—not realizing that their efforts to "help" might be perceived as confrontational or even threatening. They work and they work, but they can't figure out a way to help you out. Which means, to them, that they haven't succeeded. And the less they succeed, the more they start to worry that maybe they're just not good at this at all. No wonder they start to think you're brilliant: you've been fucking up the game so relentlessly that they literally can't conceive of how badly you're doing this. And you're over there, so convinced that you're actually doing great, that they... just kind of do you the courtesy of believing you. But the only thing they fail to understand is that, well, some people are just really fucking stupid.
It's hard for them, because once you understand the game, you realize that it's not one that has winners or losers. Either you both win or you both lose. Why on earth would you set out to lose? Why indeed, unless somebody handed you a rulebook for a totally different game and you got confused?
Chess is lovely. There are plenty of games to play with people that feel an awful lot like chess. Games of insight, games of wit, games of cleverly maneuvering others to locations. I recommend improv comedy. Or flirting, if you're really masochistic.
But it seems a waste of time to devote yourself to making other people miserable. Whatever time you think you're saving by disregarding other people's feelings is more than squandered by the lingering resentments, the accumulating sense of betrayal and mistrust, and the ever-deepening pain that would rapidly heal if you helped heal it, but can destroy a person's head for years if you're too thick-headed to notice your mistake. Personally speaking, as an incredibly rational and intelligent man, I do not recommend this approach.
And if you happen to know somebody like this, and feel tempted into believing their own delusions of impressiveness, just take it from me: that person is an idiot. You have my permission to think of them as stupid too. Might as well call them out for it, and skip town before they treat you to the wounded monologue that invariably follows. Believe me, it's for their own good. Maybe it'll even nudge them a little closer towards being a decent human being for the first time in their lives.