How To Tell If Your Dinner Date Is A Sapiosexual

"The idea of sapiosexuality has been quietly gaining traction in recent years," according to The New York Times in a recent article headlined "The Hottest Body Part? For a Sapiosexual, It's the Brain" — a title that pretty well defines what the term means. In other words, for some folks, smarts is seductive. Forget his greasy man bun and that Klingon face tattoo — he's got Karl Ove Knausgård on his Kindle. In Norwegian. Ignore her industrial-strength braces and hyena laugh; she does the Saturday crossword in three minutes, with a calligraphy pen, and understands the generalized continuum hypothesis.

Sapiosexuality is a real thing. Articles on it have appeared everywhere from Vice.com to Teen Vogue. Sapiosexual is defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary ("Sexually attracted to intelligent people"). If that's not enough proof, the dating site OkCupid now offers members the option to identify themselves as sapiosexual — right alongside asexual, demisexual, heteroflexible, homoflexible, pansexual, queer, questioning, and more.

Does sapiosexuality sound like your flagon of ambrosia? We approve — but be careful. Unfortunately, unlike obvious physical attributes, intellectual ones aren't always apparent at first glance. It's entirely possible that you might find yourself out on a date some night with someone who sort of seemed smart online, but turns out to be more dense than Mensa.

Worry not, though. Here's how to figure out pretty quickly just how sapient your date really is.

A true sapiosexual...

Translates your order of arugula salad with goat cheese followed by roast chicken with peas and morels into genus and species. ("Ah, so you're having the Eruca sativa with cheese from the milk of Capra aegagrus, then the roast Gallus gallus with Pisum sativum and Morchella esculenta? Sounds scrumptious.")

Gets a dreamy look and quotes Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market" while gazing at a slab of toro at the sushi bar. ("Only you: / dark bullet / barreled / from the depths...")

Gives you a half-hour refresher course in the history of the Duchy of Burgundy when you order a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. ("Things started changing around there in 534, didn't they, when the Franks defeated Godomar, who, as you know, was Sigismund's brother...")

Corrects the bar menu, with a calligraphy pen, so that it no longer offers "Johnny Walker," "Hennessey," or "Hendriks."

Doesn't care that Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth don't eat animal products — has never heard of Miley Cyrus or Liam Hemsworth, for that matter — but tells you that that cool eleventh-century Sufi poet Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri had some interesting ideas about veganism.

Knows how to pronounce bruschetta.