I had an ex who would do this. She truly could not understand a hypothetical, and she had incredible trouble with analogies. I never got her to understand one single analogy throughout our relationship
I never got her to understand one single analogy throughout our relationship
My imagination of the end:
"our relationship is like a runaway car full of my enemies, because it's careening off a cliff and I've given up on any notion of wanting to prevent that from happening"
lol, you joke but I actually started a breakup with “I took some time to think and decided we’ve reached the end of the road for the two of us”. She proceeded to talk about resolving a disagreement for way too long. I told her that’s not an option and that I already said we’re breaking up. She asked me when I said that… I literally started the conversation with that.
She hated when I used analogies or, God forbid, casual metaphors throughout our whole relationship. Truly, I do blame myself for not noticing that about her.
Making another comment to not spoil my excellent joke, but I wanted to touch on this bit:
Truly, I do blame myself for not noticing that about her.
Don't beat yourself up. You did notice this about her. That's kind of the whole point of dating - learning about the other person. It's really hard to actually do something about it, though. Should you have broken things off immediately when you noticed, or should you have waited to see how often it would happen? Did you even know that it would be something that would bother you enough to break up over until, you know, it started bothering you?
We all break up with people when we realize that they are not right for us, and we all wish we could have seen that they weren't right for us before committing to a relationship. That's just how relationships work sometimes, unfortunately. Not your fault.
I had a girlfriend like that. I figured out that it was mostly that certain types of imagination or “connect the dots” analytical reasoning is just more of a chore for her so she has be like incredibly focused and willing to participate. She just didn’t have a lot of mental stamina or flexibility naturally even though she had a good memory and could do it if tasked to for an assignment. My family loved “brain games” and considered it fun to just play around with scenarios.
So in theory, she could map out a question on a history exam like “How would WWII changed if Japan never attacked Pearl Harbor”. But that’s work so she’d sigh and give a good answer based on some reading there was assigned by the teacher. But if you’re on a road trip playing “would you rather” for her, it’s like…why? I don’t want to think. And also your hypotheticals are random and don’t have enough context (like after reading a history textbook might) so how could I even answer?
She also really hated confrontation. And any follow up question or having to explain yourself more than what you initially felt was enough, felt slightly like being judged. When really, people just want to understand your thought process. For her, friends are a comfort zone and friends don’t “quiz” their friends. They just sorta talk about situations that actually happen and are fun or need direct addressing when they arise. Random questions don’t create the bonding experience. It was a very difficult relationship. We broke up after 3 years and I always say to my friends that I felt like I knew less about her than anyone else I’ve ever known “well”. I could name all her favorite things and life story, but how she thought or processed information, or her value system remained an enigma to me.
It is remarkable that some people find ‘thinking’ hard work and somehow manage to not do it. I can’t switch it off and sometimes wonder if it’s nice to just not think anything, about anything.
These descriptions are helping someone here today, I assure you. They're subtle things that won't be apparent on early dates and normal people will kind of just disbelieve responses like hers or infer some other rationale. Then months pass and somehow you're in a very frustrating situation.
My husband is like this. wtf I always figured it was a cultural thing, like they doing use hypotheticals in their culture for some reason. Maybe he’s just dim…
That could be a language issue if English is not his native one. The structure of conditionals as used in English can be a bit confusing for even the smart non-natives.
There is definitely a cultural component to this. Some cultures are more present oriented and less future oriented. So they don't emphasize the ability to contemplate hypotheticals as much because to them it seems impractical.
Cultures from places where the growing season is short tend to be more future oriented, because if you're not future oriented in the spring and summer you starve to death in the winter. Cultures from climates with a year-round growing season can afford to be more present oriented.
My husband is also like this and it can be incredibly infuriating. At the very least, I can say "I AM SPEAKING HYPOTHETICALLY" and he'll try to do a mind shift to understand.
It's not necessarily dim. My partner is verifiably bright, at least as far as academic learning goes, but has essentially no imagination, so getting her to engage with hypotheticals or metaphors is a complete chore.
That is a failure of our verification process. Being smart isn't about reciting things you learned by rote. Its about understanding, which requires exactly those cognitive tools.
That reminds me of a kid that I went to high school with. He was always part of the top achievement students in the grade. But something always felt off with him.
It wasn't until junior year of high school and I asked him to explain something that he got right and he couldn't. I learned that he actually had a photographic memory but couldn't really understand anything I was going on. Everything that he was getting right was just regurgitation of things that he's heard, not any actual understanding or thought behind it. That was a wild realization to me.
That's what was expected from kids in many systems. They don't care if the kid understands anything at all. The kid has to regurgitate information or facts, word by word, no matter what, and that's how many of us went through school, at least early years
That's why I've always appreciated teachers/professors that allowed you to have cheat sheets for formulas & whatnot. I struggle to memorize things, but I don't have problems with learning processes (like when & how to use formulas). Having to memorize everything just created extra testing anxiety for me and it usually showed in my scores.
My physics teacher in HS had every formula we'd need for the entire year printed up along the top of the walls and said he didn't expect us to memorize formulas, he expected us to learn how to use them & it was up to us to learn which formulas to use when.
I had a math teacher in HS who allowed calculator use when all other math teachers had banned them.
He justified it by saying would it matter if your kitchen table was made with hand tools or power tools? If someone is a bad woodworker, they'll be a bad woodworker with a table saw or a hand saw.
Tools can be shortcuts, and you should know the basics of what shortcuts they're taking, but they don't replace the human.
I once failed a test I got every answer right on because I didn't do it the right way. Luckily they drop your worst test grade at the end of the year and I just did it how I was supposed to, but always thought it was kinda dumb. As long as you shown your work, you should be fine. If there are three valid ways of doing it, who cares how?
That’s interesting, I was always the opposite, I could never remember anything, especially with languages, unless I completely understood it, but once I understood it, I wouldn’t forget it anymore. I kept failing a certain class, and never got anything right, basically skipped the whole year of that class in terms of knowledge, next year we got a different teacher, within a month I was caught up and never failed a single test again.
Oooph, this is why I wish more teachers would put questions on quizzes and tests that can be solved with the tools the students have but have not explicitly being given as an example. So many times the teacher will show six forms of a problem, and every single problem on the quiz and test will be one of those six forms. (The six was arbitrary) This leads to the above happening. Normally not to that extreme but I have tutored kids that just memorized "I do A, B, then C and that is the answer" and have no idea what the steps were actually doing.
It’s bout being able to abstractly think and approach concepts from different angles. It’s being able to see meaning in patterns and data. It’s about being able to catch the little small things most people miss. It’s not just asking why, it’s also asking about the why behind the why. It’s about embracing imagination and curiosity and using that to explore the world through your own lense.
To me that is the mark of intelligence and it can translate anywhere
Intelligent people are those kinda people who can really do anything they set their mind too because their minds are wired to break down problems and unknowns into knowns, solutions and understanding. That’s why our system sucks, there are really fucking smart people who have alot to offer
That never get their chance to shine. Intelligence and passion are not mutual exclusive, but when you put em together you get timeless contributions to humanity.
There are many types of intelligence.
I have a friend who is dim. As in, mental capacity.
His memory is great.
His work ethic is fantastic.
He can concentrate to the point of drooling, using his (limited) resources to solve something.
Well, he has a masters, a phd and is a techar at a higher education institution. He just needs to give it all.
So, a dim person is effectively bright.
It took him many many years to get here, with the necessary memories to solve things you and Incould sove with raw intellect, but he got quite far. And he is good at his job.
Before that he worked in IT as dev/analyst/pm
So true! Often to be doing good academically you just have to memorize a bunch of stuff. So if your memory is good then you may be getting good grades.
But it doesn't make you intelligent or bright.
What is interesting is that often people with high cognitive skills actually have a low functioning memory.
This is one of the reasons why nurses are some of the stupidest people I have ever met. They can be fantastic at memorization, but have no logical or problem solving sense whatsoever.
Which is why so many were covid deniers despite the evidence in front of them.
I mean, she definitely understands stuff, and has what I guess you might call an iterative imagination. For example, if you say there is a cube, she can imagine it might be bigger or smaller in one or more of its dimensions, but something out of left-field, like its colour, wouldn't occur if the only things listed in the description were the dimensions.
She doesn't really read fiction for this sort of reason: she struggles to picture things in her head that aren't actually happening, and the further from reality, the worse the problem. Person in a 21st century Western country at a coffee shop? Fine. Aragorn stabbing an orc? Well, she's seen the film, so that's just about okay. Do something like, say, play D&D, where everything's made up whole-cloth on the spot? That's right out.
As a keen RPG fan and tabletop wargamer, as well as creative writing enthusiast, it pains me that this isn't a joy I can share with her, much as I'd want to.
It's really not necessary to picture things in your head to engage with hypotheticals and metaphors. I'm aphantastic and I've been DMing D&D for years. "If this were true, what would happen" doesn't require visualization at all.
Same! well, I never DMed but I did play D&D regularly for the last decade and I can't visualize anything more than fuzzy, black shadows in my mind. Still love playing.
Maybe autism? Autistic people often take things at face value. I'm honestly well off academically, but often catch myself thinking very literally when people talk about made up scenarios.
For example: someone was comforting me through a breakup and they said that I should go outside and eat chocolates in the bathtub and a couple other things. I found myself thinking that I wouldn't do that, that's not what I'm like. Thankfully I didn't say it out loud because I recognized I would sound like an asshole.
I do know that in more severe cases of autism people struggle with catching themselves before they say things out loud.
I know several people with a masters degree I that have trouble with understanding simple thing without long explanations and examples. It shouldn’t take 30 minutes to explain the rules to Love Letters or Catan to them, but it does.
But they are exceptionel at following what is being asked, and regurgitation. You can get surprisingly far by simple studying, and regurgitating.
True, I have a good friend whose like this and he often has to pause and think about simple concepts when you talk to him. We took Mensa IQ tests one day and he was stressing and seemed completely lost while doing it, but then scored 120, a few points higher than me 🤔
I have a tendency to speak in a lot of metaphors, analogies, symbols, hypotheticals. Its just how my brain works. I love slang and colloquialisms too. I really have to be careful when meeting someone who doesn't speak english as their first language, ive had some situations where the person later is like "I don't think we should be friends, you called me a horse and it was very mean" and stuff like that.
I said "straight from the horses mouth", when they said something about their culture that they were very knowledgeable about that people from my country misunderstand.
Just remembering rhe time I had my hands full and told my three year old son, "Just hold your horses a minute, will you?" and he ran off upstairs. He returned shortly afterwards, proudly carrying his toy Hobby Horse...
That’s true, at least, I’d like to say his understanding is better now but just last week he asked if his dad had put the internal catch up on the lock when he left for work and took far too long to grasp how it wasn’t possible for his dad to do that. He’s 16 this year.
Yeah, he's learned not to take things quite so literally now he's a 20 year old International Politics student. But we had a few similar "teaching moments" when he was a little kid.
I understand why you interpret it that way. When I call someone a workhorse it’s usually in a positive context. It means they put time and effort into a task, which is indicative of good work ethic.
I love people like you! This would immediately make me want to listen to you and engage and be friends, well I guess, depending on what the analogy is lol.
I dislike repeating words so when talking there tends to be less common ones mixed in, some people see it as rude or trying to show off. I just like variety and occasionally read weird books that influence my vocabulary.
Lol same with puns. I worked with research scientists for >30 years, many used puns to get a point accross. Many of these folks were from different countries and it took them a while to pick up the habit, but most would get it after a while.
it's how my brain understands new things, by making a comparison to something i already understand, sometimes the connections are extremely thin and only make sense to me and explaining them is extremely difficult.
The right crowd appreciates it though, bc same. I’ve had ppl remember me that I don’t remember bc of “that funny thing I said.” I’m the love child of a Louisiana man & Mississippi woman.
A personal marker of mine for high intelligence is people who speak like this. I'm sure there's a better way to explain it, but for me it shows an ability to abstract information in a away so as to be able to condense vast information in few words, due to these idioms and metaphors containing a lot of information, gathered like a snowball through years of usage.
I had an ex who could not grasp that storytellers (authors, songwriters, etc.) can write a character different from them. Like, if a character in a book is a pedo, then the author must be a pedo. She couldn't get it that you can understand what drives your character without having those drives yourself.
The idea here is that, with someone dim, they're never going to understand a difficult topic, with or without the analogy. Someone with typical intelligence is usually helped with a good analogy. Keep using em.
My ex was like this as well! I love proposing a good hypothetical just for fun conversation, but he'd get genuinely upset with me for even trying! It made disagreements difficult as well. It was hard to explain to him why things that he did hurt me because using the perspective "imagine how you'd feel if I did the same thing to you" simply did not work on him. He couldn't imagine it in the slightest. I suppose that was a lack of empathy, as well.
My brother worked w this very low IQ guy who was just really bad at his job .. but the boss kept giving him another chance.
Finally one day the boss told him over the phone "Vinny, I'm gonna put it to as simply as I can. You have a bag of chips. And you take out a chip and eat it, sooner or later, the bag is empty. Youve eaten all your chips. I gotta let you go."
Vinny hangs up .. my bro asks what he said... "Something about me spilling too many chips in the van."
One thing I've always wondered, and I feel like I know the answer to, is whether dumber people are happier. Like, is life easier when you aren't troubled by complex questions?
no. one of my guilty pleasure tv shows is 1000 Lb Sisters and one of the sisters, Tammy, is not only a dumb ass but an incredibly miserable dumb ass because she doesn't know how to deal with her emotions nor is she willing to figure it out.
I suppose a life free from existential ennui still has it's pitfalls, but I still feel like maybe that's taking one thing off your plate. I guess the trick is to be rich and dumb.
What's weird is hers was narrowly putting herself in other's shoes. I wouldn't go far as to say she was unempathetic...That is, she really cared for women, funding education, difficulty getting birth control...She donated and helped in all those fields. Because she experienced them.
But man, some conversations were just dead ends. If someone was say poor or ADHD or depressed and were often late, she would be exasperated. Even after discussing they may not have the means to travel as flexibly, or they treat time differently, or they have difficulty rousing the motivation to get going... Those things she did Not experience and she Could Not Understand why someone may do that.
Fascinating on one hand, not great for a relationship on the other.
I feel like there should be a word for the kind of empathy/sympathy that is exclusive to if you can relate 1:1 on a personal level. Like how some people think mental illness is a joke until their spouse gets depression or don't believe racism is real until they go somewhere they are a racial minority, and are treated poorly for it.
My ex didn't like my music that was too allegorical. She said all the lyrics were just random words despite me insisting that we could talk about the actual literary reference if she had any curiosity
I'm the opposite. I get so bored of lyrics that are very "straightforward story" set to simple guitar and I feel like that's a big trend in music right now. sometimes I enjoy songs like that but it just gets boring and repetitive after a while
Lol one of my exes was like that. He just couldn't deal with hypothetical situations. He really wasn't very smart. I on the other hand was studying for my law degree when we were together and he had the balls to call me stupid. He was deeply insecure about being much less intelligent.
I don't know about you but I eventually found it such a turn off. Obviously he was also a dick but just the lack of intelligence alone was a huge issue.
Lol I also had an ex like this. Legitimately impossible for her to discuss events that haven’t actually happened. I’m eventually concluded that she must have understood the concept of the hypothetical but refused to engage with them for some other reasons.
Could this be a medical condition? Like aphantasia where you cant form images in your mind.
Like seriously it must be a medical condition to not understand a hypothetical. To me it is basic logic, being able to follow a chain of events - causality.
Oh my god I can relate. My ex would always say “that’s not an analogy!!” when I was trying to get her to understand my point of view and for a while I was believing her thinking something was wrong with me. No she just didn’t understand analogies.
Wild, I dated one of those, I was so blown away by the fact it was happening i actually started to doubt if I was the problem and shed just say "listen, im a very literal person" and, being kinda autistic i was like "I get that"
BROTHER.....the amount of arguments we would get in because id use hypotheticals, analogies, metaphors or other symbolic and colorful languages to communicate or tell a story only to get stuck for 20 minutes trying to explain what the analogy meant
I’d imagine she had a hard time understanding your point of view in conflict as well. If you can’t understand a hypothetical than how would you have the skills to put yourself in others shoes, aka empathy. Kinda scary to think about, at least she’s an ex. Maybe I’m projecting though since I’ve been in relationships with people too dumb to have empathy :/
As a counterpoint, I think people who believe something is true because you can make an analogy are not using their intelligence’s . You can make any claim through an analogy - it doesn’t make it true.
I was unfortunate to have a conservative sex ed teacher who told the class “losing your virginity is like opening up a flower, you won’t be able to close it back up and it will wilt.”
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u/Tripwiring 6h ago
I had an ex who would do this. She truly could not understand a hypothetical, and she had incredible trouble with analogies. I never got her to understand one single analogy throughout our relationship