Fair points and they were only examples. It's better to say there are varying degrees of intelligence and it's not something that can or should only be measured only by ones level of education. It's okay to say it's a good measure but it's not the only measure and it's not one that people shouldn't automatically assume means high or even good levels of intelligence.
I'd say that you can figure out pretty quickly if someone is reasonably 'intelligent' after a couple of dates, so there's value in potentially ignoring flags like "didn't go to college" if this person seems to hit on all the other notes. You might meet the person and find out they didn't go to college because they got a job as a software dev straight out of highschool and make good money and are intelligent.
I think that the idea of taking more chances is a legitimate one, and I can see in how my female friends swipe on dating apps how them being inundated with options makes it hard for them to 'focus' on the important things.
I think that there is probably a decent chance that you can get a general idea of how smart someone is by seeing if they graduated college, and maybe you can see how successful someone is by seeing how much money they make (they removed that from OkCupid a little while ago) - but that if you're struggling to find a good match for yourself, it's time to think outside the box and challenge your methods.
Speaking of methods and my female friends swiping habits, I honestly am so damn fascinated by it, because I just -don't- get it. I have a close work friend who has been opening up to me a lot about her trouble finding someone to be in a long term relationship with, and how she's afraid of not finding anyone to have kids with soon. She's a sweet woman and I think she's amazing, but I can't help but feel that she needs to readjust how she's looking for a partner if this is how she feels - but she doesn't seem to be. If you see her on Tinder, for example, she'll swipe 'no' on 85% of guys within
literally 1 second. She'll stop if she sees something that is attractive to her (I'm not really good at figuring out what sort of guys are attractive to women, but these are all tough, square jaw'd 'grown up bro'-esque sort of dudes, look 90% the same to me) and she'll look at his other pictures. Then the superstition comes in - if she she's him with a woman in the picture -anywhere-, she declines. If there are not at least 3+ pictures, she's done. If he is wearing any clothing that doesn't appeal, done. One time a guy had two pictures that were too similar to each other, and she was done with him. It was bonkers to me - I was asking her why she was swiping guys away a lot and I would just get the weirdest answers. She didn't even look at the profile information at -all-.
I think what that sort of made me realize is that some people maybe have no idea how to
look for the sort of person they idealize. That they have a system that they use to get dates, and even if that system doesn't work, they don't think about changing it - they just think either A) something must be wrong with them that guys don't want to be long term, or B) they have really bad luck.
A counter to this anecdote is a friend I was closer with about 2 years ago, she would drive me around a lot and talk about her dating troubles and I don't know what it was about our conversation, but she seemed to actually appreciate my input. At one point she told me about a guy she was kind of into, but he didn't seem to hit all the 'notes' she was looking for - she described him to me and he sounded great. He was a year or two younger, and was still figuring out his career stuff but he was
on the way to getting there - paid internships and freelancing for experience. He was a bit goofy, and she usually was into the dark/brooding type, but I love goofiness so I was like "Bitch, go for it". And yeah, they just got engaged. I think just her challenging what she eventually perceived as a broken system for finding dates is what really found her someone great.
).
