So smart yet so… not

My boyfriend, who is an M.D., cannot talk on the phone and drive at the same time. (Please do not tell him I said so, because another thing he’s incapable of doing is laughing at himself.)

I, myself, have a Doctoral Degree (Juris Doctorate, or law degree) and yet I suck at secretarial work and waitressing. When I waitressed during undergrad at The Spot in La Jolla, I’d forget to put people’s orders in and then try to lie my way out of it (as in “Sorry your food’s still not up– those medium rare steaks take so long to cook!”) It got so bad that I felt sorry for my customers.

All of this got me thinking about the nature of intelligence. When I was a kid, I used to imagine that our physical attributes had been selected after waiting in a series of lines, much like the mythical bread lines in Russia (I thought that, quite possibly the reason my nails sucked was because I spent all of my time in the hair and eye-color lines. Apparently they ran out of recessive attributes early, and I did get the blond hair and blue eyes.)

While I no longer subscribe to this ideology/creationism theory, I must say that it makes a certain kind of sense, if not literally than at least in principle (although Scientology’s creationist theory makes far less sense in literal terms– google “volcanoes” and “Body Thetans” if you’re not up to speed on what Tom Cruise & Co. believe.)

While it’s not true that people who have, say, killer bodies usually have butter faces (as in “nice body but her face…”), it is true that mathematical geniuses are generally lacking in interpersonal relations and fashion sense. Apparently, a great spot in the mathematics line means one gets last dibs in the fashion sense line. Put another way, it’s as if God said “Okay, humanoids, you can have wicked math skills or good social skills and fashion sense, but not all three.”

Unfortunately, I got stuck in the creative skills/A.D.D. line, which tied up my precious attribute-selecting time, preventing me from getting a decent place in the time-management skills line, among others (apparently the people administering the A.D.D. line themselves had A.D.D.)

But seriously, people, how many detail-oriented types are good at creative stuff? Aside from the whole right brain/lrft brain dominance thing, are there those who are so smart that they can do it all?

The other day, my friend Karen was telling me how she wishes her husband were more spiritual. I told her that in life, men generally fall into two categories: the solid, detail-oriented, responsible, good-provider types or the passionate, thoughtful and spiritual…. rarely both.

This, of course, begs the question: would you rather have a thoughtful mate who worshiped your ground and spent all day doing things to make you happy, or one who made gobs of money and remembered to pay the mortgage, on time? Put another way: is it better to have a mate who annoys you by making no money or one who annoys you (and maybe then some) by being insensitive to your feelings?

Personally, I think it’s all about the fit. Couples are, ideally, unions that function as one team-unit. If you are lacking in one area, ideally, your mate will compensate. The more you lack a particular characteristic, the better your mate needs to be at it.

If you spent all of your time in the math-genius line, chances are, you got scraps from more than one other line (like social graces and fashion sense.) Hence, you’d better find a partner who got a spot in those other lines early-on, or you and your spouse will wind up wearing matching fanny-packs one day!

And you really wouldn’t want to inflict that element of pollution (ugliness!) on your earthly brethren. For one thing, you could end up here.

Lets face it: people need each other. To pick up the slack, if nothing else.

Next time, in Part duex:: the repercussions of waiting to get hitched (or getting too used to living life as a solitary unit…)