Thread: How do you really know if you're in a healthy relationship?

Anony, Let me preface this, that I'm not trying to dump on you. Writing this was a helpful thought process for me. You may be aware that women are largely verbal processors while men are internal processors. You triggered a thought journey and I'm sharing it. I think you have often shown real insight into people's feelings and offered some excellent advice. Your response really struck a chord in me.

I just divorced a man who is exactly what you described, with a twist however. He is highly intelligent in certain limited ways - reads computer code like most of us read a newspaper, retains trivial that non one else cares about and trots it out regularly to show his superiority. He has been diagnosed as narsistic.The twist? My IQ is a good 40 points higher than his, all the stuff about irrational, petty 'female' idiocy is a bit out of line with me. He may be high IQ but his EQ is in the cellar, burried some place. His real problem, is that he is so enamored of his own intelligence that he can't tell that most of the time he comes off as a borish idiot. Having decided that he is superior, he can communicate with hardly anyone, gets fired like clockwork, if there is and error on a bill or problem that needs correcting, he insults everyone who could help him and gets no where with it. Over and over, when someone would try to explain something to him, something in their field, he wasn't able to understand because he was so busy trying to figure why they must be wrong because he was certain he was smarter. I ran into it, he would try to argue my areas of interest with me, he had no idea what he was talking about, that never stopped him. He come off looking like an idiot, smugly certain of his intellectual superiority.

He is the classic bull in the china closet, can't discourse, he berrates. Can't handle social situations, insults people right and left without knowing it. It must be a terrible way to live, it's certainly difficult to live with. In his illnesses it became nearly deadly, he'd read every drug sheet, examine the chemical structures (who cares?) and proceed to get nearly every side effect on the list - including the ones that No One gets, they're just on there for legal reasons! Drove the doctors nuts, he'd listen to only half or maybe a quarter of what they said, decide he knew what they were going to say and fill in his own ideas. He convinced himself that he was getting alzheimers and started to exhibt symptoms, when in fact because he gets his hormones by injection, he's at far lower risk than most men. It became maddening to live with.

I know one factor in this and I think it's far more pronounced in males (probably because of the way the hemispheres of the brain communicate), is that highly intelligent people's brains work differently. I've had a couple of small brain injuries and don't retain and process info like I used to. I'm aware of it and it's frustrating - it's like when you have word on the tip of your tongue and can't get a hold of it. But I still usually grasp things far faster and in a different way than other people. I can see possiblities in things that other people don't seem to grasp. You may experience this too, however I take an educational approach, ask questions, try to understand their perspective, instead of assuming they are idiots. Often times they can see something I don't, also they are in the majority and like it or not are pretty firmly in control. You p*ss them off and they will shoot you down. How smart is it to keep p*ssing them off? You've got to learn to live in the world as it is. That's the only way you can effect change. Yes there is a lot people just don't 'get', that there are things that could be easily changed and make everyone's life simpler, but if 'they' don't get it, being rude, arrogant and demanding won't change that.

I like the the definition of insanity, often credited to Einstien but probably originating with Ben Franklin, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If what you've been doing, how you've been relating to people, isn't working, then as an intelligent being, you need to change it. Think about this, you said, "when I'm having a discussion with someone and they cannot take in what I am saying, miss the point, make a big deal out of something irrelevent, it can be very frustrating." Who has the problem here? The guy who can't communicate his ideas in an understandable fashion, suited to his audience or the listener?

Some basic communication classes can be great help. While I found speach classes useful, love being the devils advocate and switching sides, back and forth- if you can't argue at least three positions convincingly, you don't really understand the subject. But speech is really more mind games, what was the real eye opener for me was technical communication. Technical journalism or speech, learning to write specs and instructions that can actually be understood is a skill few master and more needed than any other. Women are better at this than men. Here's what really got my attention: a stage in a lecture hall, a curtain dividing it in two. The audience can see both sides, the people on the stage cannot see each other. A table on each side, an identical pile of tinker toys on each table. One person on the stage must build something with the tinker toys while verbally instructing the person on the other side to build an identical structure. They can't see each other or what the other is doing. Sometimes audience reaction will cue them that they aren't doing a very good job of communicating. The items are never the same the first few tries. Two women after a couple tries would get it and could do it, the men never quite got there. My experience was within the context of an engineering program, I don't know if men trained in a more 'people oriented' field would be better or if women who have less technical training would do as well. The point is, it's about communication skills and the abiltity to use language that the listener can understand and that is in itself a kind of intelligence.

You need to use your intelligence to smarten up, get more flexible in your thinking, learn to go inside and find the child who can play.That's what made Einstein truly genius, he had a sense of humor and pathos, he had perspective about what he created. He could explain things on a human level without making people feel stupid or inadequate. Figuring out the theory of relativity was highly intelligent, explaining the theory of relativity in terms of the difference in time perception for a man sitting on a hot stove or sitting with a pretty girl was genius. People (read mostly men) who suffer from this need to get over being intelligent and start learning to show some genius!