Before she left some years ago for one of the top business schools, one of my co-workers asked me, "Are men intimidated by smart women?"
In retracing this now, I think part of the answer is that we want to show our best selves, and as we go about doing so, we start to evaluate ourselves instrumentally, which completely obliterates sense of our own intrinsic value.
To deal with this, we then try to live the male fantasy (e.g. Princess Bride, Stardust) "where we vanish into thin air, come back 10x times the man we were, and our problems are solved."
Another part of the answer is that few of us ever really know what it is that we want - not truly. We simply grasp at mirages that we think will fulfill us.
