Sometimes when you are dating or considering a relationship with a smart person, it can make you pull your hair out. You want to understand them as a real person and feel emotion in them, but no matter what you do, they always have a logical, intellectual way of explaining away how things feel, favoring instead, how things work. Alternatively, you may find that they tend to get enraged by your intellectuality, always complaining to you that you don’t seem to understand them at all, which angers you too, because you’re smart enough to understand what’s going on between you of course. But what they mean is that they don’t feel you understanding them, emotionally, not truly empathizing with them.

It is a form of “isolation” - concentrating on the brainy explanation of a situation - one derogatory phrase that was popular for a time was “mansplaining,” or using “man-language” to describe the details of a social situation without regard to the emotional nuances, and coming off as somehow “out of touch” with the reality of the human experience.

And so when we intellectualize, we distance ourselves from the uncomfortable or conflict-ridden emotions, keeping the emotion apart from ideas. We think about desires and impulses instead of just doing them or stopping ourselves from doing them (which can, of course be a good thing, making this social habit more mature than primitive or immature. Yet in our communication we tend to use formal, sterile terms, avoiding what we may believe to be socially unacceptable emotions by focusing on the intellectual aspects.

For example, in the former scenarios, if the man were to tell the woman whose grandpa is dying, “Well, grief is normal. Usually, you have to go through anger, bargaining...” Or if the man were to tell the woman about the child who soils himself at church, “Honey, it’s normal and natural for a kid this age to not be able to control himself...” Or if the woman were to tell the man about his boss, “Honey, if you get threatened with being fired so much, maybe that’s not the right job to have. The boss doesn’t sound competent...” Or the man tells the woman whose best friend has vomited on their new couch, “Clearly, since it smells like vomit, she was drinking last night and has a problem. I think we should get her some medical advice...” they are all intellectualizing the situation.

GO BACK TO NEUROTIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS.