Have you ever met someone, really liked the way they look, dress, smell etc, you immediately start imagining some sort of happy ever after? Naturally you summon the courage to ask them out on a date; they say yes. Your heart does a few cartwheels. The excitement is through the roof. Date night comes, food orders are placed, the lighting is epic, the wine starts flowing and they start talking. Then it hits you.
You are witnessing a crime against human intelligence because every time they speak, you feel a few brain cells poorer. You get dumber by the word. How do you react? Last week, our boy was faced with such an existential crisis. He is an avowed sapiosexual. No; I do not mean those frauds whose online profiles spell out ‘sapiosexual’ right next to a badly lit grey image of Sisyphus pushing a rock. You know, the lot whose main obsession seems to be playing Einstein on apps whose admission criteria is having a pulse, a smartphone and decent internet connection.
Two lines into their profiles and you find a barrage of retweeted Full Figure insults and Kasuku’s latest case of foot-in-mouth disease. No, he is not like that. Our boy is different. He believes that the fate of the human species is perilously hanging on the intellect of people we choose to date and ultimately procreate with. His choice of partners are clearly the kind who at dinner will casually shift gears from discussing the intricacies of the limbic system to offering a blistering critique of the works of Søren Kierkegaard and wash it down with a reflection on Ramathan Ggoobi’s economy that seems to only work for ‘the haves and have-mores’.
We know him as the brother who does not go for dates unless he has exhaustively done a deep dive into his intended’s online life with a comb. You cannot fool him easily. Until that is, last month when on his way to a business meeting in Cape Town, he saw a girl he simply described as ‘a literal portrait of grace and beauty. A dream’. He made the approach. She told him she was going to Kigali for the BAL basketball tournament. He got her number and set up a date on return. And this is where it all seemed to go south.
After the basic pleasantries and superficial talk about their shared love for basketball, the conversation moved to more weighty issues. According to him, she might as well have stayed home because she did nothing but take him through endless loops chasing intellectual shadows. Fed up with trying to understand her, our guy started pushing back with facts. She was irate. He sipped his wine and leaned back. It was, to him, like an invite for an earful about how he does not listen, is inconsiderate and a know-it-all. He called for the bill, ordered for a cab for her and walked. Never to text again.
During our usual drinkup, a nosy fella asked how the date went. He shot back: ‘I absolutely like this lady but that date felt like I was explaining gravity to an excited poodle which merely wanted a belly rub’. He was clearly irate and wanted to vent. He continued: ‘if you do not know something and I show you that you do not know, why then is that gonna break down to: ‘you are a know-it-all’?’ He said he felt drained. Part of me hopes he goes on more dates like this.