If you are gifted, you have probably noticed that even in a room full of intelligent, accomplished people, only occasionally do you meet someone who thinks the way you do. When it happens, the conversation goes somewhere different, and you remember it.
Gifted adults have trouble finding friends and romantic partners with similar depth, complexity, sensitivity, and interests. There are not many such people.
That is not a social failing. It’s statistics.
I’m Dr. Patricia Turner, a Registered Psychologist in Calgary, Alberta. I work with gifted adults, and the difficulty of finding people to relate to comes up often.
In this article I explore why the numbers are against you, which of your search constraints may be worth loosening, and where gifted adults may find each other.
Why Gifted Adults Are Statistically Outnumbered
Being gifted puts you in the top 2.5% of the population based on intelligence test scores. This means that only 1 in 40 people are gifted, so you may have to meet a lot of people to find others with a similar IQ to your own. If you are highly gifted, the number of people with an IQ similar to yours diminishes even further, making it even more difficult to locate potential friends and romantic partners.
When you find people with a similar IQ to your own, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are similar in age, of the desired gender, or that they possess other characteristics that would make them a good match. When you factor in these additional variables, the people you are looking for become even harder to find.
Which Constraints Are Worth Loosening
What can you do to meet more potential friends and romantic partners if you are gifted? One concrete thing is to loosen the constraints you have in place regarding who qualifies. Gifted adults need to seek out intellectual peers everywhere, and will benefit from being more open to less traditional friendships and relationships. Which constraints you can afford to loosen, however, differs depending on what you are looking for.
For friendships, the constraint that is easiest to loosen is age. A gifted adult in their thirties may have far more in common with someone in their seventies than with most people their own age. Gender can matter less in friendship than people assume, and so can level of education and occupation.
The same arithmetic applies to romantic partners, but the constraints work differently. Most people looking for a partner want someone near their own age, and that is not a constraint most are willing to loosen. If age stays fixed, something else has to give. That usually means looking past the demographic markers people use as shortcuts — level of education, occupation, income, the neighbourhood someone lives in. None of those is a reliable indicator of the depth and complexity you are looking for, and screening on them narrows an already small pool.
Identifying details in the following account have been changed.
I worked with a woman who wanted to be in a relationship and was having no success finding one. She held a senior role, earned a good income, and had concluded there were very few men who were a match for her professionally. She was not wrong about that.
I suggested she loosen her constraints. About a year later, a fellow she had liked in high school got back in touch. He had not achieved as much professionally as she had, and he lived near the town they had both grown up in. They started texting, then driving back and forth to see each other. They enjoyed each other’s company a great deal and started to vacation together. He had liked her a great deal at seventeen, and it turned out he still did.
His title, his income, and where he lived all turned out to be irrelevant. What mattered was that he liked her.
Where Gifted Adults Find Each Other
One way to widen the pool is to look for communities organized around something you care about, rather than waiting for the right people to join the circles you already move in. The story below illustrates this point. Its subject was a teenager, but his search parallels the one gifted adults have to make.
This is a story I was told years ago, with details changed.
Stuart was 18, and his parents understood that he needed intellectual peers. It helped that both were professors, and knew from their own experience that gifted youth can often hold their own with mature adults. Stuart had a strong interest in astronomy, so they pointed him toward the city’s astronomy club and helped pay for the supplies to build a telescope.
Most members of the club bought their telescopes rather than building them. They were intrigued that Stuart had built his own, and engaged by his enthusiasm for the project. Once they discovered he could converse with them and explore novel concepts at their level, they treated him as a peer. He remained in the club for years and formed several friendships focused on their common interest.
The takeaway, if you are gifted, is to look for intellectual peers in non-traditional places where gifted adults are likely to congregate. Public lectures at a university are one option. So is a book club, which filters for people who read a great deal — often the kind of company you are looking for.
To find a group, don’t constrain yourself to one composed of your own demographics. Perhaps try a seniors’ book club, since retirees often have more time to read. Don’t assume that retired people are slowing down. Many have decades of reading behind them, the time to keep going, and they can be fascinating to talk to.
One of my favourite new friends is a gifted artist fifteen years my senior. She stretches me intellectually and artistically in fantastic ways. Her body is slowing down. Her mind is not. I would not miss out on knowing her for anything.
What to Do When You Meet Someone Worth Knowing
While exploring a new group, identify gifted adults you are drawn to and want to spend time with. Don’t worry that they aren’t employed or travel six months of the year. Focus on whether you have found someone you enjoy talking to, and follow it up when it happens.
I held a garden party once and hired Mark, a pianist, to play in my backyard. When he took a break, he complimented my garden. I said that gardening is like a dynamic painting, and that this is what holds my attention. He said I had just described what composing music is like. I asked how, and we talked for the next twenty minutes.
He had to get back to playing. I didn’t want the conversation to end there, so I suggested we pick it up the following weekend when we would both have more time.
I would never have guessed that a pianist and a gardener would have so much in common, and in one sense we didn’t. The commonality was not in the activities. It was in how each of us thought about what we were doing, and in being able to talk about it at that level. We were twenty years apart in age. What drew us together was that we were both gifted.
I did not always manage this. I remember meeting an incredibly interesting woman at work when I was 29 years old. She was the receptionist and in her early sixties. She was a political activist with a focus on effecting societal change, and she was plainly gifted. I didn’t realize at the time that she and I had the potential to develop a wonderful friendship. Today, I wish I had met her more often for coffee and stayed in touch. I missed out on a friendship because I was blinded by her age.
Considering Next Steps
If you have spent years feeling that conversations never get going, or don’t go deep enough, the loneliness that comes with that is real. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you, and it is not solved by trying harder to fit in.
What helps is understanding the statistics and then searching accordingly. The process asks you to give up some assumptions about who your people are supposed to be. But it can yield good results.
If you want help with this, reach out to a psychologist in your area. If you are in Alberta and would like to book an appointment with me, please contact me. I work with gifted adults in my practice.
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