Smart Girls Don’t Get Boyfriends
It’s a good thing you’re not smart.
Because smart girls don’t get boyfriends.
by Brooke White
As I waited for the light to change, I spiraled into a moment of weakness and sought male validation. Or perhaps praise. I turned to the co-worker I had become so infatuated with and asked, “Did you think I was smart when you first met me?” He paused for a few moments, as if trying to convince me that he actually considered me his intellectual equal, and shrugged:
You don’t want to come off as smart, Brooke.
Somehow, in a seemingly productive conversation about my own intellect and ambitions and curiosity, we looped back to a 21-year-old woman’s presumable priority: Finding a boyfriend. With no answer to my question, he referenced his smart and successful female executive friends who are so agonizingly and unfortunately alone. Ladies, why work at Goldman Sachs when you could have a husband instead? With a condescending pat on the back, he reassured me that my desire to be smart is entirely incompatible with my role as an eligible, albeit less smart, girlfriend.
I am ashamed to admit, however, that I initially searched for any semblance of logic in his thought process. As a woman, those are my instructions. I have been trained to trust men and doubt women. When a man speaks, I think of the most logical patterns in a his argument, and if he slips up, it’s ok! He still gets his point across. Bravo. But if a woman makes a mistake, ever so slightly, even just once, she loses all credibility. Indefinitely.
I remember walking along this same sidewalk nearly a year ago when two drunk men stumbled behind me, mocking me for the bottle of water I fiercely clung to. I was afraid. “Is sparkling water the only thing you drink, princess?” I ignored them, knowing that any reaction would provoke them further, knowing that they sought solely to intimidate me. The faster I walked, the closer they came, laughing between themselves and then at me. “Come on, sweetheart. Can’t you have a little fun?”
Obviously, these were the men I’d wanted to become my boyfriends.
Did you know that women are disposable? In his rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s 1963 hit “Wives and Lovers,” Andy Williams swoons us with threats of being abandoned by our husbands should we kiss them goodbye with curlers in our hair:
Hey, little girl. Comb your hair, fix your makeup
Soon he will open the door
Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger
You needn’t try anymore
For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I’m warning you
Day after day, there are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don’t send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again
Well, I don’t even curl my hair, so I guess I’ve lost a husband even before I had one.
A boyfriend of mine once asked me to buy a push-up bra in hopes that a low neckline and more cleavage would give him permission to parade me around, akin to a show horse. But seduction and sexiness don’t make men take us more seriously; they merely prolong our brief period of indispensability.
I recently went to a bar with a man whose cockiness took me so much by surprise that I, reluctantly, had to pause mid-sentence because I lost my train of thought. So he laughed and slouched back in his bar stool and muttered, mid-drink, “Oh sweetie. I’ll give you a moment to collect your thoughts.”
Last winter, when my boyfriend and I returned to campus after four months in Paris, a guy in our dorm asked us about the trip. He did not look at me or address me once. So, in what clearly became an exclusive man-to-man exchange, I assumed the position in my boyfriend’s shadow, nodding and muttering in agreement whenever he spoke: A good woman follows her man. When our friend asked for recommendations of Parisian hot spots, it didn’t matter that I had spent an extra month and a half there or that I’d studied French for almost nine years, unlike my male counterpart — a man’s opinion is always more respected even with matters he knows nothing about. Another example of a male’s assumed trustworthiness without having to work for it.
Have you ever met a man so preoccupied and so distracted with relationships as women are? At the end of the summer, my co-worker wheeled herself into my cubicle and lamented her perceived masculinity when it comes to dating. What does that even mean? She pulled out her phone and scrolled to one of her numerous dating support groups on Facebook, admitting that this is how she spends her time on her commute home: “Brooke, I’m telling you. This guy asked me out to brunch, and when I said yes, he asked me where to go. So according to these teachings I’m trying to follow, women should never — and I mean, never — *she pushes her palms together, almost as if to pray* take the lead in these situations. So anyway I tell him, ‘I’m an old-fashioned type of dater, so I like it when the man takes the lead and picks the place,’ and he hasn’t responded. Do you think I was too masculine?”
…what?
I stared at her blankly, at a complete loss for even insincere words of advice, asking her to repeat this entire scenario, and she pulled up a dating website whose aim is to “Teach Women to be Women Again.”
I laughed, “Babe, I think this is a load of bullshit. Telling a guy where you want to get brunch isn’t exactly a blow to his ego.” She spun around, scooted back to her cube and whispered, “I’ll send you the link when you’re tired of being single.”
The amount of effort we put into being the women that men want us to be astounds me. We should try, but not too hard: Too much intelligence is intimidating, and too much make-up isn’t genuine. We should be sexy, but not too sexy: Wearing a push-up bra makes our boyfriends desire us, but we also need to let them play alpha and defend us from the other predatory men at the bar or the restaurant, even though they asked us to wear that bra in the first place, knowing other men would react that way.
But I still can’t figure out what to make of my friend’s boyfriend’s father who urged him to dump her a week before Spring Break just so he could find new and more exciting women to sleep with — and then dispose of. She dumped him. And she’s single now. But who knows? Maybe she was just too smart. (By the way, I am that friend.)
