The arc of a sapiosexual — an apology

“An apology to the ones I let go and didn’t see your strength. I just looked for beauty and intelligence in the same. I didn’t see intelligence is the thing that I was truly after — until later.”

That’s the whole thing, and I mean it. Not a caption, not a bit — an apology. I’m not going to name anyone or tell anyone’s story but my own; that’s not what this is for. This is me looking back at a record I made and scoring it honestly, which is the one rule of this whole house. I got some of it wrong. I’m saying so out loud.

The arc

Here’s the shape of the mistake, because the shape is the lesson.

What I thought I wanted: beauty and intelligence in the same — both at once, the whole package, right away. Nothing wrong with wanting both. The trouble was the order I looked in.

Where the eye goes first: beauty. The eye is fast, and it’s the wrong scout. It reports back before the real thing has said a word. So I let the fast signal do the choosing, and I missed people I shouldn’t have.

What I was truly after, the whole time: the mind. The way someone thinks. The argument across the table. The strength I walked past because it wasn’t announcing itself. I didn’t see that intelligence was the thing until later — and “later” is a hard word when it’s about a person you already let go.

So this is what a sapiosexual actually is, at least the honest version of me: a person who is drawn to a mind first — who finds the deepest attraction in how someone thinks, doubts, argues, and sees. It took me too long to trust that about myself. I kept looking for the mind next to the thing the eye wanted, instead of letting the mind lead. To the ones who had the strength and got let go before I’d learned to read it: I’m sorry. That was mine to fix, and I hadn’t yet.

Brilliant first. Beautiful too.

The apology, turned into the ask I actually make now.

I didn’t only feel the regret; I fixed the order. It’s already written into the front door of this place, in my own hand — the one I’m looking for is “brilliant first and beautiful too, the one who’d pick up the other end of the rope because she’d want it carried too.” That’s not a line I wrote to sound good. That’s this apology, learned and put back into practice. Brilliant first is the whole correction in two words.

And it’s the same thing the entire museum is built on, which is maybe why I built the museum: only humans score; the devil’s advocate is the mind that argues back; the the tell is the human who catches what the confident thing gets wrong. I fell in love with that — the doubt, the reading, the strength that shows up in how a person thinks. I was a sapiosexual before I had the word for it. I just had to stop letting the fast scout choose.

The eye is fast and it’s the wrong scout. Brilliant first; the rest follows.

Honest footing (0g). This is the curator’s own words, in his voice — his apology to make, said lightly and plainly; the italicized line at the top is verbatim his. No one is named, described, or identifiable here (the privacy floor, kept at full strength) — “the ones” stay entirely his own to hold, and this page makes no claim about any specific person, past or present. “Sapiosexual” is used as a plain self-descriptor — attraction to intelligence — not a clinical term. An apology is a human re-scoring of one’s own record; that a person can look back and judge themselves honestly is the whole thesis (only humans score), and it applies to the one doing the looking too. Kin: brilliant first and beautiful too · the devil’s advocate · The Tell.

The machine can rank a face in a millisecond. Only a human falls for a mind — and only a human says sorry for learning it late. ;