Basic Trope: If the story features two smart people of compatible gender/sexual orientation, they will be attracted to each other.
- Straight: Doctor Alice and Professor Bob meet, find each other's smarts appealing, and start dating.
- Exaggerated: Doctor Alice and Professor Bob get married because their IQ scores were next to each other on a list.
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob become close friends over their shared love of advanced mathematics.
- Justified: People are often attracted to other people because they share similar traits, and it's nice to have someone who is bright enough to follow your line of thought around.
- Inverted:
- Pair the Dumb Ones
- Doctor Alice only dates Dumb Muscle-type men, because they're easier to order around.
- Doctor Alice and Professor Bob hate each other's guts.
- Subverted: Doctor Alice dates Professor Bob once, then dumps him for Charlie the janitor.
- Double Subverted: Who turns out to be extremely bright himself, and well-educated; he just likes working as a janitor.
- Parodied: The government passes a law requiring all geniuses to breed with each other in hopes of creating a generation of super-geniuses.
- Zig-Zagged:
- The series has many smart people, some of whom date other smart people, while others date people well below their intelligence level.
- From Double Subverted, Charlie is a Genius Ditz and thus, despite his moments of brilliance, is not that smart. Alice likes him the way he is, but she finds that his moments of brilliance make him even more attractive.
- Alice and Bob are bisexual Serial Spouses, having respectively been married to, in order: (dumb) Charlie and Carol, (smart) David and Diane, (dumb) Emily and Ed, and (smart) Fran and Frank.
- Averted: Despite there being at least two geniuses in the cast who could theoretically get together, they never show the slightest interest in doing so, and no one ever suggests it.
- Enforced: "We need a girlfriend for The Smart Guy so we can maximize the number of romantic subplots. How about a Hot Librarian? That way we don't have to stretch too much to explain how he met her."
- Lampshaded: "So, I take it you two met at a Mensa meeting or something?"
- Invoked: Doctor Alice looks for eligible men at her Mensa meetings.
- Exploited: Professor Bob is secretly an Evilutionary Biologist who wants to be the father of the new Master Race.
- Defied:
- Bob: "Date Doctor Alice? Hell, no, I want a woman who won't challenge me intellectually."
- Alice: "Date Professor Bob? Hell, no, I want a man who won't challenge me intellectually."
- Discussed: "Do you think Alice and Bob ever actually get it on, or do they just discuss quantum mechanics in bed?"
- Conversed: "There's only two characters with IQs above room temperature on this show, no surprise that they've hooked up."
- Implied: The smartest characters get along the best with each other and it's suggested they may well become Friends with Benefits, if not more.
- Deconstructed:
- Professor Bob never dates because he never finds someone as smart as him. The loneliness turns him into a Mad Scientist.
- Other than being smart, Bob and Alice really don't get along that well.
- Reconstructed:
- Professor Bob meets another Mad Scientist and they become Happily Married.
- Eventually, they develop a Slap-Slap-Kiss relationship.
- Played for Laughs: Both Bob and Alice are Insufferable Geniuses who generate ample Cringe Comedy by driving each other crazy in an extreme Awful Wedded Life scenario.
- Played for Drama: Both Bob and Alice have an ambiguous disorder that makes them very hesitant to take the next step with each other, and they regret not doing so for the rest of their lives.
Doctor Alice, executor of the first successful human brain transplant, and Professor Bob, inventor of the time machine, I pronounce you genius and genius. You may now go back to Pair the Smart Ones and make out!
