black excellence: we have a problem.

There are certain sentences that tell me more about a man than he probably realizes.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a young Black man who expressed interest in me. We were discussing his experience living overseas in Morocco. He explained that while there, he had learned some of the language but eventually stopped using it and lost much of what he had learned.

That part did not bother me.

Language requires practice. Skills become rusty. Life moves forward.

What caught my attention was his explanation:

“I don’t really see the value. I’m an American.”

And immediately, something in my attraction shifted.

American Is a Nationality, Not an Intellectual Boundary

What does being American have to do with whether another language has value?

America itself is multilingual, multicultural, multiracial and influenced by communities from virtually every part of the world. Being American does not require intellectual isolation from everybody who isn’t.

That mentality represents something much larger that I have increasingly realized I am incompatible with: the bare-minimum approach to intellectual development.

It is difficult for me to understand having lived in another country, having been immersed in another culture, having begun acquiring another language—and then deciding that maintaining any of that knowledge has no value because you returned to America.

You don’t have to become a linguist.

You don’t have to speak five languages.

You don’t have to spend every evening studying world history.

But I need curiosity.

I need a man who recognizes that knowledge itself has value.

Misalignment in Mediocrity

One of the greatest misconceptions about compatibility is that attraction automatically creates alignment.

It doesn’t.

A man can like me tremendously and still not possess the worldview that makes me interested in him.

That distinction has become increasingly important as I’ve gotten older. I’m not simply listening to what a man owns, where he works, where he traveled or what school appears on his résumé. I’m listening to how he processes what he has experienced.

Did traveling change anything about you?

Did education make you more curious?

Did encountering another culture challenge anything you previously believed?

Can you explain what you learned?

Or did you simply go somewhere?

Because there is a difference between having experiences and becoming experienced.

That difference matters to me.

HBCU Doesn’t Automatically Mean Alignment

This becomes particularly interesting within the Black community.

Two Black people can attend HBCUs and still emerge with completely different understandings of culture, history, education and global citizenship.

I don’t automatically assume that because a Black man attended an HBCU, he and I will think similarly.

An HBCU education can place extraordinary history, scholarship, tradition and Black excellence around you. But proximity to those things does not guarantee that someone will internalize them.

The same applies to international travel.

A passport full of stamps doesn’t necessarily create a worldly person.

You can travel across continents and remain intellectually in the same place you started.

What My Father Taught Me Without Giving Me a Lecture

Perhaps my expectations are different because of what I witnessed growing up.

My father is a retired United States Navy Master Chief who served for 28 years. His military career took him around the world, but what has always stayed with me isn’t simply the list of places he visited.

It’s his ability to remember them.

He can talk about people.

He can talk about environments.

He can explain what he observed and what those experiences taught him.

There is substance behind the passport.

When I listen to many military members from his generation recount their experiences abroad, I often notice that same quality. The journey became part of their education. They didn’t simply leave America and eventually come home. They encountered a larger world and brought pieces of that understanding back with them.

That’s well-roundedness.

And because I grew up around that, I recognize its absence quickly.

My Family Changed My Baseline

The same thing happens elsewhere in my family.

I have a cousin who speaks several languages, and her five-year-old son is already learning and speaking Arabic.

Think about what that represents.

A child is being taught from the beginning that language is not something threatening to his identity. Learning another language doesn’t make him less American. It expands the number of people, ideas and cultures he may eventually be capable of understanding.

That is the environment against which I naturally measure intellectual curiosity.

Not perfection.

Not elitism.

Curiosity.

So when a grown man tells me another language has little value because he’s American, he’s unknowingly showing me how differently we may understand personal development.

The Culture of Well-Roundedness Is Disappearing

We also live in an era where people can sound informed without necessarily becoming informed.

A person learns a few psychological terms.

A few business terms.

A few political terms.

A few relationship terms.

A few phrases from social media.

Suddenly everybody can say narcissist, boundaries, trauma, accountability, generational wealth, emotional intelligence,and alignment.

But vocabulary isn’t enlightenment.

Knowing the word alignment doesn’t mean you’ve examined what alignment requires.

Knowing the phrase generational wealth doesn’t mean you’ve studied economics.

Using the word culture doesn’t automatically mean you’ve studied your own—or anybody else’s.

Articulation should be the product of thought, not simply the repetition of fashionable language.

That is part of what concerns me about the loss of well-roundedness. We are gaining access to more information than any previous generation while sometimes developing increasingly surface-level relationships with knowledge.

Black Intellectual Curiosity Matters to Me

This becomes even more significant when I think about Black relationships.

Our community has spent generations preserving history, traditions, language patterns, family stories, music, scholarship, entrepreneurship and cultural knowledge despite enormous pressures toward erasure and assimilation.

That history makes intellectual curiosity particularly valuable to me.

I don’t expect every Black man I meet to share every opinion I have. In fact, disagreement can be intellectually healthy.

What concerns me is disinterest in learning.

There is a difference.

I want Black men to remain curious about Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and every other place their lives may take them—not because learning about another culture diminishes Black American identity, but because understanding the world can deepen our understanding of ourselves.

Attraction Requires More Than Attraction

This is ultimately what I have learned about myself:

A man being attracted to me does not automatically make me attracted to his mind.

There has to be more.

I need intellectual movement.

I need curiosity.

I need someone who understands that education doesn’t end when the degree is framed.

I need someone who can travel somewhere and return with more than pictures.

I need someone who encounters knowledge and thinks, How can I retain this? How can I expand this? What else can I learn?

Because that’s how I was raised.

Watching my father become a Master Chief while carrying decades of experiences from around the world shaped what well-roundedness looks like to me. Watching members of my family embrace languages and expose their children to cultures beyond their immediate environment reinforced it.

That became part of my baseline.

So perhaps what some people interpret as me being “too particular” is actually something much simpler:

I know what intellectual compatibility feels like because I’ve already experienced it within my own family.

I don’t need a man to know everything.

I don’t need him to have traveled everywhere.

And I certainly don’t need him to think exactly like me.

But I cannot manufacture curiosity for another adult.

If the world has already placed knowledge in your hands and your response is, “I don’t see the value because I’m American,” then perhaps the problem isn’t that either of us is necessarily wrong.

Perhaps we’ve simply revealed that we are operating from two very different definitions of what it means to grow.

And for me, that difference matters.

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© 2026 Adrienne Floyd / AyeDNicole. All Rights Reserved.

This article is an original commentary reflecting the author’s personal experiences, observations, opinions, and perspectives. It is presented for literary, educational, cultural, and commentary purposes.

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