In a recent interview with former catholic priest Alberto Linero for CNN, resuming his much talked about retirement from the priesthood, he happily expressed that he was a “sapiosexual” and explained that he was a mature man in his fifties, and that what he was looking for in a woman was the company and intimacy of an erotic and pleasurable conversation. 

It is estimated that only 8 percent of adults are like this, sapiosexuals, which means that the factor that most excites them is the neurons.

Today, we talked with Daniel, a sapiosexual as he describes himself: “I enjoy a conversation, ideas, topics regardless of the physical aspect. Within all this there must be a connection of course”.

Sapiosexuals not only admire intelligence or minds; it is what they highlight the most in that potential partner, as it excites them sexually above physical appearance.

Daniel adds: “Physique is not everything. The most important thing is the ideas. But if you ask me, physically, as a man, I look at a woman’s hair, breasts, figure. But if after we are together, the conversation is not interesting, nothing happens”. 

John Money, a New Zealand psychologist and sexologist, tried to explain this through his ‘love map’ theory, in which people are attracted to certain qualities that condition their sexual attraction.

According to Money, each person designs this map in their mind, in which they represent their idealized lover, imagine them with everything that eroticizes them and the practices they consider most stimulating. He called this the erotic personality and it is expressed through dreams or fantasies. Each map is unique even though it might have similar features of the map of other individuals.

The love maps are formed from birth and have all the information, experiences, stimuli and positive or negative childhood experiences that leave marks that can hinder affective and erotic bonds.

Among famous sapiosexuals is the actress Marilyn Monroe, who was pigeonholed as a dumb blonde, but she was far from it. She once admitted that Albert Einstein was the most seductive man she had ever been introduced to and did not hesitate to propose him: “we should have a child together so that he would have my physique and your intelligence”.

Sapiosexuals do not fall in love at first sight, they take their time, that is why their relationships start with a friendship that can change to a sexual attraction as ‘minds get naked’. 

As Gloria Arancibia Claver, psychologist and sexologist, explains: sexual attraction has a lot to do with the physical, more than with the mind; but attraction integrates many things: sense of humor, capacity of understanding or the way of expressing the feeling, qualities that are related to intelligence.

The tendency is to believe that someone is intelligent because they know the periodic table or solve theorems. In reality, there are different kinds of intelligence: emotional, social and even erotic, and there are common traits in these types of intelligence such as a sense of humor, empathy and, especially, the ability to solve problems in new situations.

Gloria notes that the attraction for intelligence can sometimes lead to certain dangers: “In the consultation it happens a lot that one goes from admiration to idealization of the person and from there to dependence, and this reinforces even more the lack of self-esteem in insecure people and can derive in the domination of the one who is supposed to be more intelligent and the submission of the other”.

In the imaginary of sapiosexuals there are some prototypes in which teachers, writers, scientists and even librarians stand out.

The advantage of feeling seduced by the intelligence of the other is that this type of attraction is not affected by the passage of time, nor by extra pounds or wrinkles.

For sapiosexuals, seduction is born from the word and from what you hear, that is why they say that women are more sapiosexual than men. Experts say that there are still men who find it difficult to recognize that a woman is smarter than them.

Maybe for Marilyn Monroe her best resource was to play the fool and seduce them with her beauty.

Traducción del español: Catalina Oviedo Brugés