Earlier this year, a woman posted on Threads that a man she had been dating dumped her after discovering that she had a library card. She shared a screenshot of what she said was the man’s “breakup text,” in which the writer accused her of “wasting hours” like “some little kid playing pretend smart” and excoriated her for failing to satisfy him sexually: “Reading books? Really? While I’m sitting here with actual needs!!”
The internet, of course, reacted. Memes and think pieces abounded. These responses weren’t just gasps of outrage at the man’s dismissal of literacy and his base sense of entitlement. They also captured a particular kind of anxiety about a sometimes highly sensitive question related to romantic compatibility: What happens when you and your partner are on a different intellectual plane?
I didn’t always have language for this type of gap. Growing up and attending church, I heard a lot about the biblical caution to “not be unequally yoked” to a mate, invoked to warn Christians against consorting with nonbelievers. As I developed my own intellectual practice, during which I grew to believe that many sacred texts were best read figuratively, I came to understand the biblical advice differently. To be equally yoked meant to walk forward together without one pulling harder than the other. Basically, you don’t want one member of the pair to be missing the beat.
Over the years I worked on my doctoral dissertation, about the brilliant and tortured John Milton, my adviser and mentor was the acclaimed Miltonist Francis C. Blessington. In many of our conversations, he spoke fondly about the wit and wisdom of his wife, Ann Taylor, also a professor, and a writer in a completely different field. As a young person, I think I took for granted the kind of similitude this couple shared. At Blessington’s memorial service last fall, I eulogized him and met Taylor in person for the first time. She spoke about their intellectual companionship with such love and specificity that it stopped me. They didn’t work in matching fields, and they didn’t have identical minds. But they were two people whose depths met.
In reflecting on my mentor and his wife, I couldn’t help thinking that Mr. Breakup Text, in revealing what lay within his depths, at least did the woman he’d been dating a favor. Better for her to know about his disposition sooner rather than later. I also had no doubt that John Milton himself—who in 1643 nearly destroyed his reputation arguing that intellectual incompatibility should be legal grounds for divorce—would have agreed with me.
In the summer of 1642, Milton married Mary Powell. In short order, she left him.
Milton’s response was to do what many intellectuals do when their personal life implodes: He turned his crisis into theory. In 1643, he published The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce, which made a bold claim that marriage should be dissolvable when spouses are cerebrally incompatible. The backlash was immediate and severe. Divorce in 17th-century England was nearly impossible, granted only for the most extreme circumstances (abuse, for instance, or infidelity). But Milton wasn’t arguing about tangible, provable transgressions. He was arguing about loneliness—the specific, suffocating loneliness of living with someone whose mind you cannot reach. For doing so, he was effectively canceled.
His argument was anchored by a close reading of Genesis. When God created Eve as a “help meet” for Adam, Milton suggested, she was not meant to be simply a body for procreation or a servant for labor. If that were all Adam needed, God could have given him anyone. What Adam required was a person he could speak with—a source of “apt and cheerfull conversation,” someone with whom to share thoughts, to reason, to find the companionship of mind that makes solitude bearable.
And when that communion is absent? Milton had a word for it: bondage. He wrote that to couple two souls whose minds don’t meet is to join “a living soule” to “a dead corps.” Marriage devoid of intellectual intimacy isn’t merely disappointing. It is a form of living death, worse than being alone, because at least in solitude you aren’t confronted daily with the failure of connection.
[Read: The tyranny of the relationship gap]
Milton’s most radical claim was that intellectual incompatibility is a more serious problem than adultery. “He who affirms adultery to be the highest breach,” he wrote, “affirms the bed to be the highest of mariage, which is in truth a grosse and borish opinion.” Adultery within a marriage can be overcome, he believed. A mismatch of intelligences cannot. He then went further, mocking the Church of England for being more concerned with resolving a lack of conjugal relations—“the disappointing of an impetuous nerve”—than with “the ingenuous grievance of a minde unreasonably yoakt.” To him, intellectual companionship outranked sex not just as a nice feature of marriage but as its entire foundation.
That was a radical notion in 1643 (and, I would argue, it remains so). Milton’s insistence that wives be intellectual companions to their husbands was progressive for the 17th century because it implied that women were capable of rational thought and meaningful conversation. His view ran counter to prevailing beliefs, which said that, at most, a wife should be educated enough to converse with her husband but not so educated that she might challenge his authority.
Across the centuries, other writers and philosophers have considered the importance of intellectual parity between the sexes. In the mid-1700s, a group of Englishwomen known as the bluestockings created salons where serious conversation was the point, and where women’s minds were not secondary to men’s. (That the term bluestocking became a slur demonstrates how threatened broader society remained at the idea of women as intellectuals.) Nearly 250 years after Milton, Nietzsche engaged with the question of cerebral compatibility from a slightly different direction. In his 1878 book, Human, All Too Human, he argued that marriage is fundamentally a long conversation, and that when choosing a partner, you should ask whether you can talk well with that person into old age.
Like Milton, Nietzsche characterized intellectual communion as fundamental to a lasting union, not as a bonus. I align with the thinking of both. But the person who really helped me answer the question of what matters in romance, the mind or the body—or whether those distinctions are even useful—was not someone I read. It was someone I listened to: the lyrical philosopher known as Prince.
I’ve spent a good part of my career thinking about music as a form of knowledge. But Prince had me long before any of that. I was captivated by his creative fluency, the way he moved from intellect to physicality to spirituality without ever treating them as separate domains, let alone ranking them.
If I were to sketch a longer trajectory of those rankings on the way to Prince, it might go something like this: Saint Augustine built a bridge between the sacred and the profane that Western thought has been living inside ever since. In the 14th century, the Italian scholar-poet Petrarch elevated love by spiritualizing it, positioning the beloved as an untouchable muse—adored from afar, beautiful precisely because she was unreachable. Milton imagined intellectual communion as divine but didn’t connect it to the body. In the 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley argued for a fusion of souls, describing the concept of the “twin flame”: “We shall become the same, we shall be one / Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? / One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew.” Nietzsche abandoned the sacred entirely and kept only the mind. And much of 20th-century pop culture (especially in music) swung the other way, reducing attraction to the body alone.
Prince knocked all the walls down. Where Petrarch’s lover might have written “I love you so much I could die,” Prince took the conceit and made it visceral, carnal, immediate—then turned around and insisted that the mind was what he was really after.
Many people register Prince’s hypersexual image and miss the consistent thread of yearning for intellectual intimacy running through his music. In “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” he doesn’t position himself as a conqueror. He asks to be repositioned as a confidant, someone granted access to a woman’s unperformed interior world. The song isn’t seduction. It’s a plea for the kind of knowing that Milton called “meet help” and that Nietzsche called “a long conversation.” Prince just set his lines to a drum machine.
[From the September 2026 issue: The great romance slump]
Even in “Sexy M.F.,” in which the surface is pure provocation, Prince insists that what he wants is “not your body, your mind, you fool.” The argument for intellectual intimacy is embedded inside the most overtly physical song imaginable because Prince refused to separate the categories. On “Love 2 the 9’s,” you can hear him testing what some psychologists refer to as “cognitive tempo” in real time. The track is structured as rapid-fire banter with the artist’s creative collaborator and eventual wife Mayte Garcia, a back-and-forth in which wit, timing, and verbal dexterity are the point. It’s flirtation, but the flirtation is the assessment. Can she keep pace? Can she volley? Prince isn’t just charming her. He’s running Milton’s compatibility test on tape.
The artist’s 1996 three-disc album, Emancipation, released simultaneously as a declaration of freedom from Warner Bros. and a celebration of his marriage to Garcia, fuses romantic partnership with creative autonomy. The track “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife” collapses every form of intimacy—companionable, lustful, familial, marital—into one person. His vision wasn’t Milton’s hierarchy or Nietzsche’s abstraction; it was total fusion. He wasn’t asking whether his partner knew what he knew. He was asking: Can we know each other completely?
Though Prince’s vision was extraordinary, not even he could sustain it, in practice. His marriage to Garcia ended in divorce after the loss of their son; his second marriage also ended in divorce. Which brings us back to the question: What, in practice—and amid the chaos of modern life—is actually achievable? I have come to believe that what sustains intellectual intimacy is not a shared knowledge base or level of education but rather three elements operating together. When even one is missing, the whole thing may falter.
The first element is curiosity. Here, I don’t mean that people must be curious about the same things. Rather, each needs to show a willingness to care about what the other person deeply cares about. What are you reading? is a question about someone’s day. What are you enjoying about it? is a question about the person.
The second element is a shared language—the ability to pick up what the other person is putting down, without a decoder ring—meaning the shorthand that you use, the references that land, and the nuance that doesn’t need to be spelled out. In the field of rhetoric, this is described as a “discourse community,” a relationship between individuals that is solidified, in part, by their norms of communication.
The third is mental timing: having the same cadence of wit, the same processing speed, the ability to volley and return. This is what Prince showed off in “Love 2 the 9’s.” It’s what researchers studying interpersonal synchrony are now measuring at a biological level, because when people truly click, they’re literally falling into rhythm, matching heart rates and brain waves.
In musical performance, coherence doesn’t come from sameness but from attunement. Musicians listen for structure, timing, and possibility. They respond, adjust, and extend. They are, in a sense, thinking together. Relationships work the same way. What we experience as being “seen” is often a shared capacity to track and respond to each other’s signals. Two people can inhabit entirely different domains and still meet each other with immediacy, grasping nuance, appreciating enthusiasm, building on each other’s ideas rather than flattening them.
The real intellectual gap in relationships, then, isn’t between knowing ball or knowing Aristotle, to paraphrase Taylor Swift—because the issue isn’t whether your partner knows what you know. More important is the difference between disinterest and curiosity, between aloofness and care, between “You’re boring me” and “I don’t get it yet, but tell me more.”
Some people may think that worrying about intellectual compatibility is precious or elitist. But centuries of thinkers agree that minds matter, conversation matters, and being mentally alone with someone you share a life with is a particular kind of suffering worth taking seriously. My advice? Find a person who wants to hear about what you’re reading, not just someone who waits for you to close the book.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.