I was drinking my coffee and checking emails, my usual routine, when I noticed a handsome face on my screen from match.com. His profile said “Graduate of Harvard Business School and Retiring McKenzie Consulting Partner.” Hmm… a man with a big bulge—and in his back pocket, which doesn’t hurt! Some things might just taste better rich, like chocolate, coffee, beef bourguignon, and men. I thought that forty-eight was awful young to be retiring, but everyone lies about their age online, right? I know I did, so who was I to judge? We met, and I found him fascinating with impeccable credentials. He told me he never went to a party in college because all he did was study, and he graduated magna cum laude. I told him that all I ever did in college was party and I barely graduated. We had a lot in common—NOT!
I had never dated anyone so brilliant and smart. It was a little intimidating. We dated for a few months. Once, he gave me a report he had published in the Harvard Business Review. He told me to read it so we would have something to discuss. It was the business matrix model of a Fortune 500 company—not exactly some Fabio-covered easy-reading Harlequin paperback. It was all I could do to hold back the laughter because he was dead serious about having “something to discuss.” I thought, OK… socially introverted nerd meets fun-loving, gregarious, big-hair ex-beauty queen. You guessed it! We would have never dated in high school. He was really handsome and such a genius, but he always said the wrong things and had no sense of humor. For every ounce of book smarts he had, he lost an ounce of social charisma. And the fact that he did not drink any alcohol didn’t help. Unfortunately, he was not a foodie and pizza was high on his list. As a matter of fact, on one of our dates at a pizza joint I mentioned that I needed to bring a pizza home to my kids for dinner. After dinner, I also mentioned I left my purse in his car. “I’ll go out and get your purse.” he said. What odd behavior for a man who bragged about making $1,000,000 a year and drove a $70,000 car! Get my purse? What about pulling out that wallet of yours, Mr. Harvard man? I actually mentioned that I thought it was cheap of him, and in response, I received a thirty-minute analytical lecture of why it was not his responsibility to pay for his girlfriend’s kids’ dinner. I paid the $12 and took the pizza home. He was a complete genius with no common sense. He just could not understand why he didn’t get any that night, but sometimes you get what you give.
We continued to date, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak. The mother of all intellectual flubbers came as we were making love when he wanted to solve math problems in the middle of trying to get me to reach an orgasm. “Oh, baby the square root of 38 is OOOOHHHH!” Should I scream or should I laugh? Actually, I didn’t know the answer, so I just screamed and moaned. Hell, I needed a calculator in bed with this man! Our final date ended when I went to Florida to his home before it sold due to the divorce. We had a wonderful dinner in Key West , and I had put on a sexy nightie. “I’ll be right up,” he said. “I just need to check my business emails,” In spite of our previous difficult equation, there I was all dressed ready to give him a happy ending. Finally, I went to check on him, only to discover that the “business emails” he was looking at were from match.com. To say the least, there was definitely a hurricane swarming in that household that evening. There was no intellectual reasoning (which the devil couldn’t beat him at), nothing analytical, nor even a bold-faced lie that would have salvaged that relationship after that. I promptly took the guest bedroom and flew home the next morning. It was a disaster I should have seen coming. After all, good sex should never involve solving for a problem! Lisa in Sandy Springs, Georgia
(Ahh the looks-good-on-paper guy. This guy is so tempting to many of us women and I blame it all on Clark Kent with his befuddled looks and his knowing blue eyes peering out of those nerdy little spectacles. The problem is that while intelligence is a turn-on- we really want Superman. Deep down we want a man that is going to throw us over their back, fly us to their cave…er home, and tear off our clothing. Not someone who is pontificating the square root of pi. They usually say God giveth with one hand and taketh with the other, and the case is certainly true for this bloke. Like the pretty girl who never had to develop a personality, it goes to show we should never judge a book by its cover- even if it’s from Hahhh-vahhhd.)
