How your partner interprets silence is one easy way to tell how intelligent they are. Some might see a partner’s silence as a personal attack and immediately default to panic , while others reserve judgment and are more inclined to give space. That small difference between taking things personally and seeing them in context is the essence of relational intelligence .

In love, intelligence has little to do with just your IQ. Rather, its primary function is to calmly hold space for what you don’t know. It’s the ability to stay grounded in uncertainty and let pauses, moods, and ambiguity exist without rushing to fill them with worst-case scenarios.

This is known in psychology as the ability to “depersonalize.” Its antithesis, on the other hand, is “personalization”: the tendency to draw

See Full Page