We live in an age of instantaneous everything. Swipe right. Double-tap. Next. The speed at which we now decide whether someone is worth our attention has been compressed into a fraction of a second, and almost always, that decision is made before a single word has been exchanged.
We have become a culture that flirts with surfaces.
Anthony D Brice put it plainly: they’ll stare at your body but never ask what built your mind. Most people are chasing pictures. They want the image, the aesthetic, the curated version of a person that fits neatly inside a phone screen. There is nothing wrong with finding someone beautiful. Beauty is real, and it matters. But there is something quietly devastating about a world where the conversation stops there.
Think about what it actually means to be attracted to someone’s mind. It means you have to slow down. You have to listen. You have to be willing to be challenged, surprised, even occasionally wrong. Intellectual attraction requires you to show up as a whole person, not just a face with good lighting.
That is not easy work. And most people, if we are being honest, are not looking for work. They are looking for reward. The gym-sculpted body, the perfectly posed photo, the comment section full of praise. These are signals that say: I am desirable. But desirability built entirely on the physical is borrowed time.
Bodies change. They gain weight, they lose muscle. They age, they scar, they carry the story of a life lived. And when the person who was drawn only to your form finds that the form has shifted, what exactly is left to hold them there?
Engagement takes effort. Not just the effort of showing up, but the effort of being genuinely curious about another person’s inner world. What shaped them. What haunts them. What makes them laugh at something nobody else finds funny. What idea they cannot stop thinking about at 2am.
That kind of curiosity is rare. And the connection it creates is rarer still.
There is a particular kind of intimacy that emerges when two people are drawn to each other’s minds. It doesn’t announce itself loudly. It builds slowly, through conversations that run too long, through the odd moment when someone says exactly the thing you were thinking, through the quiet recognition that this person sees you in a way that has nothing to do with how you look in a photograph.
That kind of connection does not expire. The mind does not sag or fade the way a body does. If anything, it deepens with time. Every shared idea, every honest disagreement, every moment of genuine understanding becomes a layer that the years only make thicker.
Add kindness to that, and wit, and you have something most people spend their whole lives searching for without ever quite knowing what they were looking for.
Being attracted to intelligence is not about being an elitist. It is about believing that the most interesting thing about a person has never been what they look like. It is about choosing depth over speed, in a world that has been engineered to make speed feel like enough.
Inspired by a poem by Anthony D Brice
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