Love Blind: Why Do Men Make Even The Smartest Women So F*cking Stupid?

Just the other day I sat in the quiet oasis of my Upper West Side apartment, talking on the phone with a dear friend of mine about her recent return to single life.

She lamented there were signs that her former boyfriend was never going to be what she wanted.

She told me she had been bewitched with the idea of this man; she had seen things in him that she wanted out of a partner, and yet he had proven to be exactly like every other guy she had dated.

He was, truth be told, an assh*le and a thug.

I couldn’t help but ask her why it was she had stayed for so long when she knew in her gut he wasn’t going to be what she needed.

“I was just so excited that I had finally found someone to love me.” It dawned on me that both my wonderful, enigmatic friends and I have found ourselves in these same situations time and time again, and yet we continue to choose guys who are wrong for us.

We otherwise cerebrally-coherent women are continually making horrible romantic choices.

It was a compelling train of thought.

We ladies are the most dominant, the most brilliant and the most intellectually fierce breed of females who have ever graced the world. We’re self-sufficient and can take on a host of responsibly with a glorious elegance that leaves the world spellbound.

But when it comes to matters of the heart, all of these apparent facts seem to go right out the window. Suddenly, we’re so overcome with the possibility of love that we forget to take our own happiness, both future and present, into account. We settle.

Why is it men make the most intelligent women so f*cking stupid?

We choose emotion over rational thought.

We ladies are so great at thinking with the plentiful logical facets of our brains… until, of course, we fall in love.

Suddenly, even the most rational among us become hot emotional messes.

Our judgment becomes clouded. No longer can we see the situation at hand with our usually inquisitive minds, but instead we are like lovesick teenagers, thirsty for affection. We can’t see clearly. We just think with our hearts.

We’re addicted to what feels good instead and ignore all consequences.

We’re so entranced by the feelings of infatuation that we cannot see in the long-term. We live so in the moment.

We can’t see outside of our new love and ourselves. The world becomes constructed of just the two of us -- so beautiful and passionate and so utterly idiotic. It’s so unusual for the intelligent woman to think so narrowly.

We’re so used to putting things in perspective and systematically color coding and categorizing every possible outcome. We’re accustomed to never make a move without tactical calculation beforehand.

With love, all of this attention to detail just goes to sh*t. We’re far too busy falling hard to consider where we may be landing.

That is how we get entrenched in these fickle romances: We don’t see the outcome of our poor decisions until it’s too late, and we’re too forgone to go back.

We crave outside validation.

Intelligent, successful women are the most fearless of confident beings, their light, fierceness and grace fills every nook and cranny of every room they honor with their badass presences.

Despite all of this admirable self-love, the most fabulous of females tend to lose sight of that crucial value the moment they enter into a romantic relationship. It’s as if a switch is flipped.

Where we once only needed self-acceptance to feel truly fulfilled, we suddenly can only feel satisfied if the object of our desire is validating us.

How can this happen to such smart, wonderful women?

We go from being these mighty, awe-inspiring women to these puddles of self-conscious mush. It’s truly horrifying.

We no longer look at ourselves in the mirror and take that as the nod to perfection but instead need to have that same reflection dancing the in the eyes of a man to contain the same meaning.

The power of lust overcomes the power of intellect.

Sex will always outshine brainpower in the heat of the moment. If he can use his hands, he can surely use his words, right?

The tingling in our lady loins smothers out those brightly burning embers of intellect. We become so ridiculously dumb the minute we get our fix from a sexy hunk of man.

We become overpowered by our vaginas and simply cast aside our minds. It’s dangerous, and it can lead us down a slippery slope to the depths of heartbreak.

We forget to get to know a man’s mind because we are so stricken with a helpless desire to be forever intertwined with his body.

We suffer from relationship memory loss.

According to a study documented in the Pacific Standard, researchers at Hartpury College in England found, in a pool of 146 British women ages 18 through 24, that even women with a fruitful dating history still tended to go after guys who displayed narcissistic character traits.

We just never learn our lessons.

We experience memory loss, and yet we never seem to suffer from relationship PTSD. We continue to make terrible choices and excuses for those choices despite what our obvious histories have clearly shown us.

We pretend the patterns aren’t there. It’s completely bonkers.

Chances are if this guy is behaving in a similar fashion to that of your ex, he is just as big of an assh*le. We choose to ignore the signs and continue down the same old paths in search of a different outcome.

That is the definition of insanity, ladies.

We literally become love drunk.

Even the strongest people are susceptible to becoming intoxicated.

Researchers at Stanford University have shown that love is a truly powerful stimulant that has the same effects on the brain as drugs or alcohol.

It literally makes you f*cked up.

We all know the kinds of decisions we make when we hit the bottle too hard. We know nothing good can come out of intoxicated attempts at rationality. When we’re in love we start making decisions like a drunken person. It’s a recipe for absolute disaster.

Once we’re vulnerable, we’re stuck.

We’re so busy keeping our walls sturdy, the moment we let them down, we forget how to build them again. We seem to give our vulnerability to the most undeserving.

We’re attracted to unavailability because we ourselves want to emulate that unavailability. It’s enchanting.

These strange beings are the ones who we want to give our hearts to because we can’t understand them. We envy their mystery and their inability to settle down.

We choose them because they aren’t the ones chasing us. We are drawn to the damaged person hoping to be the one to conquer them, and yet we always tend to be the ones who are broken in the end.

We’re really great at rationalizing irrational behavior.

The smartest women are, unfortunately, the ones who are the best at rationalizing irrational behavior.

Since we are so intelligent, it’s easy to find signs of reason within chaos. We can chalk up a man’s emotional issues to a psychological journey, or we can take a man’s mistreatment and act like he’s going to change.

We use our brilliant minds to conjure up ridiculous argumentations for bad behaviors. And the terrifying thing is we’re absolutely fantastic at doing so.