It’s a myth that everyone pairs off in high school. Sure, most people want a boyfriend or girlfriend, but plenty of kids just aren’t ready until college or later. A lot of kids are self-aware enough to know they’re not ready for a real relationship because they’re developing other parts of themselves. I think this is especially common with smart and ambitious kids.
I’ve observed that it’s the less mature or self-aware kids who tend to have a BF/GF earlier in high school. I think of these kids as pseudo-mature, even though they seem socially advanced.
If your daughter really wants to go to the prom (and not because she thinks she should want to go), she could ask a male friend to go as her platonic date. My daughter did this her senior year and had a fantastic time, much better than I ever did at the proms I went to with a romantic date.
My D never has had a romantic date, that I’m aware of. She will be 29 this year. She’s cute and has many male and female friends but hasn’t had the energy to spare for romance yet. She do go to banquets and proms with a date as a buddy. S is in his first serious relationship—he is 30!
My mom phoned me the other day with a hilarious but interesting story.
A total stranger came up to her at a party and said I think I met your daughter (we have a very unusual last name).
She was a retired school superintendent and was somehow involved in a lesson at my elementary school almost 40 years ago (I actually did recall the occasion, a number of strangers in the classroom, an unusual lesson format with questions to answer about a text, I may have been late second or early third grade, recently skipped and received my very first C ever for something that wasn’t handwriting or PE).
Apparently she talked to me about the assignment (I don’t remember that bit at all) and I was so articulate and coherent in expressing my dissatisfaction with my result that she thought to herself: o my God, what a smart girl -how will this one ever find a husband!
After we had finished laughing, my mom said: isnt that a horribly silly and irrelevant thought for a teacher to have? And I was like, um, actually, not really, and did you let her know I was married, with kids?
She didn’t get it. She wasn’t the “smart girl” growing up, getting hardly any romantic attention ever, trying to reconcile herself to never having marriage and family in her life, and considering the latter as much as an achievement as my law degree and professional success ever was.
Getting rid of glasses, acne, excess weight and some of my uptightness helped. But I do notice in retrospect that what I also needed to lose was some of my ambition, opinionatedness and effortless academic top dog status. Even men who don’t mind If women are intelligent and intellectual don’t cope so well with the real world result of those traits.
It does get better. But, that doesn’t mean that there might not still be trade offs.
I had crippling social anxiety, and have never been able to pick up on signals. My dating life was a disaster in my twenties (it was nonexistent in my teens). My wife was able to straight out say, “I’m interested.” Unfortunately, our sons inherited my social anxiety and haven’t dated. I suspect they are as bad as me at picking up signals.
There have been times my wife has said, “did you see how she looked at you?” The answer was always no. Someone I dated said she had been sending signals that she was interested, and even with the benefit of hindsight I didn’t see it. There were also times I thought I saw interest when there was none, so I pretty much gave up.
I’m pretty sure my 6’3" S18 would be afraid to ask your daughter out. I say that if she really likes a guy and he’s not doing anything to take the first step and ask him out. And it’s not just the high achievers who are socially awkward. My sons and I are classic underachievers/bright slackers.
I never had trouble with dating. Just because someone is intelligent doesn’t necessarily mean that they have crippling shyness, social awkwardness, or are viewed as intimidating by others.
I dunno, my older sister and I are considered quite bright. I never had trouble having male friends and dates from middle school on, I had more males interested in me than I cared about. I never had to adjust my ambitions and my BFs and now H were not intimidated by me being articulate and ambitious. My sister also has never had any shortage of male interest nor dates. She got the masters in special ed as she intended and married the guy she wanted. She was happy to stop out to raise her kids and then tutor.
It probably depends. My niece is very bright and also an attorney. She married an attorney and opted to switch from a crazy high powered job to a govt job after she started a family, vacunase the stress level, hours and benefits made for s better work/life balance. Her H went from working for a firm to working on his own for a better balance and more satisfaction.
I could go on but think the point is the pool may be smaller but lots of folks seem to navigate pretty well anyway.
There most definitely is a correlation, and there are statistics to prove it.
The most highly educated women and the least educated men are disproportionately single. Assortative mating breaks down for those two groups. Anecdotes to the contrary do not make data.
The preferred narrative is that women do not want to marry down - the male doctor being happy to marry the female nurse, but not vice versa.
I posit that at least to an equal extent, men do not want to marry up. Money and property on the female side of the family is fine, but not a noticeably higher level of educational attainment and professional success. It skews the dating pool all the way down to high school.
I would guess that there are plenty of boys and girls in high school who are convinced that nobody would want to date them. It’s most likely not true, but if they’re not able to do the asking (and risk getting rejected) they never really know. I was convinced that no girl in my high school would ever want to date me (I have no way of knowing either way). I suspect that there are plenty of guys who would love to date the smart girls but are afraid they’ll be turned down. They don’t all wear pocket protectors or spend all day on the computer, either.
Educational attainment is less important to me than intelligence; my wife and I have a Master’s in the same discipline, but she’s probably the smarter one. There’s not a huge difference, though.
Operating on the assumption that yes, there is a problem there, even though, as usual, it does not affect every smart girl or woman equally or to an equal extent, and that it probably does affect the OPs daughter (and some other posters children) at least a little, can those of us who feel that it stopped affecting them or their daughters or that it never affected them at all, think of reasons why that might be?
I know that moving to a bigger pond definitely helped.
I also know that I was insanely lucky to meet my now husband while he happened to date a woman who was perfectly nice, pretty, thin etc,but happened to only have a high school education. He broke up with her after having met me, before even seriously considering dating me, simply because he realised how much he was missing intellectual stimulation in the relationship, and thus was primed to consider brains a feature rather than a bug.
In Short,girls and women like the OPs daughter need to find someone who does not feel threatened their abilities, both because they are confident in their own and enjoy them for theirs. I believe it is easier to find them inhigher education and in some workplaces, and easier once they are a little older than high school students, who have after all barely matured into men.
And beyond that, it’s just luck = if you like them and they like you back!
Thinking back to the girls in the top 10% of our high school class of 1982, there were several I had crushes on. There’s no way on earth I would have ever had the nerve to ask any of them out. I wasn’t intimidated because I thought they were too smart; I was intimidated because they were girls. That was enough.
My response was mostly aimed at @mstomper who wondered whether there was a correlation there at all, considering he felt every single girl to be intimidating simply for being a girl.
True, @Nrdsb4, the OP asked for anecdotes - from people who “have experience with this kind of thing”! You say you don’t - and you say it’s not a given that smart people area cripplingly shy, socially awkward or considered intimidating, so I’m assuming you’re hinting you are none of these things either.
The OP says her daughter is confident and outgoing (and good looking and well liked etc), so the intimidation factor is what’s left to explain the otherwise inexplicable. Others have concurred that they have experienced it to be a factor. I know that people have treated me as if they have felt threatened by me from age 6 onwards. I have had to consciously work against that. Thats my experience with this kind of thing, necessarily an anecdote, too.
To help the OP, what did you think made the difference for you, since it is clearly, not about shyness, awkwardness or other perceived social “deficits” for her daughter?
No I didn’t. I said I did have experience being a smart young woman in high school, but answered her question “was dating harder for you when you were young because you’re smart?” with the answer that no, it wasn’t.
Why not?
-Maybe I wasn’t viewed as smart. I honestly don’t think that’s the answer since I was a straight A student in honors classes.
-I wasn’t viewed as shy, but I was considered “calm” and “reserved”. I certainly would not have been characterized as extremely outgoing, but I was told I was easy to talk to.
-Clearly I wasn’t viewed as intimidating, or I would not have had a satisfactory dating experience.
I think it may have to do with intangibles such as how a girl or boy shows interest that doesn’t have anything to do with saying explicitly that they are interested. It could be facial expressions, body language, a certain way with words. Do they seem to possess in inner confidence yet not an off-putting conceit? These kinds of qualities are hard to directly correlate to the question at hand.
How do they “wear” their intelligence? I have a friend who is genius level smart, and she has never had a satisfying romantic life. I suspect that it’s not that she is intimidating because she is intelligent, it’s that she conveys a certain arrogance about it. There was recently a post on CC where someone said that they had had the hardest time ever finding someone who was their “intellectual peer.” My friend would likely say the same, and I’d guess her attitude is part of the problem.
Unless no smart girls at the OP’s school are getting dates, I’d guess that being smart has little to do with it.
One thing I can say about myself when I was in high school that differs from the OP’s daughter was that I was only 5’ 5" tall. It does seem very likely in our society (then as now) that boys often hesitate to date girls who are taller than they are, which shows that perhaps they are intimidated by THAT rather than anything to do with the young woman’s intelligence, personality, or character.
I also agree that as described by her mother, the OP’s daughter will have no trouble attracting male attention as she (and they) mature.
Thanks all again for the responses. The more I think about it, I think that D’s ambition and drive may play a larger factor in this than her intelligence. She has very big goals and aspirations, and she likes being in leadership positions at school and the community. I don’t think she necessarily appears arrogant towards others, but she does like being in charge. I can easily see now how a rather tall, very ambitious, smart girl could intimidate the majority of the male dating pool at her school.
For what it’s worth, she had fun at homecoming with her friend, and seems to be over the dating angst for now. Now she can fully concentrate on school, ha!
I was the same height or shorter than the males I dated. I admit to feeling a bit insecure when they weighed less then me—I wanted us to be similar BMI (it’s not something I had expected to be concerned about as I am pretty low BMI, but when they were even lower BMI, it nade me FEEL irrationally huge). My BMI is and has mostly been 21-22 most of my life. Guys with lower BMIs just seemed so thin.
I have always been toward the top of the curve in school and college but seriously never had difficulty having many male friends and dates with males at any point in my life from age 16 until married at 26. I have never been shy socially, more of an extrovert. Most of the men I knew and dated weren’t intimidated by my intelligence and I considered most of them intellectual peers (or dropped them after a short while).
@Nrdsb4, I do agree that a lot about it is how you “wear” your smarts. But while you can tone down your ambitions, your opinions, work on your attitude and open mindedness (I did, or tried to - but should we really tell OP her daughter needs to lose her joy in her leadership? Is it right to tell young women they need to make that trade off, a glass ceiling imposed by the threat of loneliness?), you can’t actually tone down your raw intelligence, or lose your yearning for an (at least roughly) intellectual peer.
Regarding your genius level friend, genius level means that her IQ is at least at 150, ie about 1 in 5,000 people, or possibly even higher, maybe 1 in 50,000? Not 1 in 50 like your garden variety gifted kid.
Which means there would be about 10,000 actual peers in the whole of North America. Now calculate the odds of how many of these would be potential partners of suitable gender, orientation and age.
Now wonder your friend is somewhat jaded…