Self-satisfied, arrogant Casanovas are wearing my patience thin
Ihave to hand it to John Krasinski, husband of Emily Blunt. Unlike many men with wives far more impressiveseeming than them, he is, at least, able to admit to the fact.
Appearing on American TV last week, Krasinski told of the time an airport customs agent t simply refused to believe that he – a beardy, not particularly good-looking actor, whose biggest claim to fame was appearing in the US version of The Office – was married to an A-list stunner like Blunt. “I married up, and don’t I know it,” said Krasinski, who directed the film A Quiet Place, e, starring his wife.
If only more men could be so humble. Research has now confirmed what any woman who has ever tried a dating app already knows: even average men think they’re much cleverer and more attractive than they are. Whereas a woman of average intelligence will freely admit to her averageness in the brains score, men of average smarts are adamant that they are much better at pretty much everything – including pulling women – than they actually are.
Researchers examining this tendency at Arizona State University have demonstrated its power in
academic settings. After surveying hundreds of students, the researchers reported that if a student was about halfway up the class rankings, a woman would judge herself to be cleverer than just over half of the class, while the man would say he was better than two thirds of it.
I’m all for confidence (and men, too!), but as a fairly newly single woman, I have to say I’m running thin on patience with self-satisfied and arrogant Casanovas. My dates seem to mostly consist of giving men the opportunity to talk about themselves; it rarely occurs to them to return the interest. I presume this is because they are satisfied that they’ve got enough value for the both of us.
In reality, there’s nothing new about the hideous mismatch that emerges between the sexes in their thirties – in the course of my PhD research on the history of the dating industry, I came across many matchmakers as far back as the early Seventies who found they had a glut of fabulous, interesting women on their books and next to no men of even remotely equivalent impressiveness.
Men don’t all need to be s super-successful geniuses. But many would be far more lovable if they could just take a leaf out of John Krasinski’s book bo and, if nothing else, admit to their limitations with grace.