Smart women have harder time finding mate

[Kire]

Brainy women face handicap in marriage stakes: British survey

Sun Jan 2, 3:43 PM ET


LONDON (AFP) - A high IQ is a hindrance for women wanting to get married while it is an asset for men, according to a study by four British universities published in The Sunday Times newspaper.

The study found the likelihood of marriage increased by 35 percent for boys for each 16-point increase in IQ.

But for girls, there is a 40-percent drop for each 16-point rise, according to the survey by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The study is based on the IQs of 900 men and women between their 10th and 40th birthdays.

More: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050102/lf_afp/afplifestylebritain_050102204340

[spinbaby]

1. A very interesting topic

Perhaps it would be better off posted in a more visible forum?

[Kire]

5. It's in the lounge.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=2338642&mesg_id=2338642

[ret5hd]

2. how many 10 yr olds are married?

[nickinSTL]

3. Maybe that's because

women with a higher IQ are less likely to 'settle'.

[slor]

4. I find intelligent women sexy !

Mind candy has always been a weakness for me.

[Fire]

15. Me too

too bad they don't find me sexy...

[Rhiannon12866]

39. To me, the most attractive quality a guy can have is intelligence...

And I'm sure that there are men who look for the same quality in a woman, especially among the liberal, progressive, femi-nazi crowd.:-)

[tanyev]

6. Some discussion already in the Lounge

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x2338642

My personal take? The title should read "Smart women have harder time finding mate interesting enough to promise him the rest of your life." And in all fairness, I think a smart man (who wanted an intelligent partner) would have the same problem.

[Jackie97]

22. They would, but not as much of a problem...

Because when some smart person is really clued in to a subject, they have a way of getting aggressive about it so they can get their point accross. That's accepted with men, not as much with women.

[MissBrooks]

7. I am living proof of this ....

Too smart to get married.

[Warpy]

8. So am I

too smart to stay married.

[Demeter]

10. Been There, Done That

got the child support....

[RubyDuby in GA]

9. Amen

"Women in their late 30s who have gone for careers after the first flush of university and who are among the brightest of their generation are finding that men are just not interesting enough,"

Understatement of the century. My "knowledge challenged" dog is more interesting.........

[TaleWgnDg]

11. Hhhhmmmmmm . . . why would any man want to marry a "dumb

broad?" (excuse the language, please) . . . And I am serious here. I didn't marry somebody who was dumb. If I had, what the hell future would it reap? No thanks.

My wife is intelligent. A professional. And a great wife and mother to my kids. Our kids are bright too. Never could have happened with a low-watt wife. No way.

Hats off to America's bright women.

.

[Southpaw Bookworm]

12. So that they can control them

Because in a lot of corners of this country, that's what little boys are taught to do, consciously or not. Or so that their egos are not bruised by an "inferior" who knows more and does more than them.

[wildeyed]

13. Exactly.

If you marry a stupid woman, you run the risk of having stupid kids. And that wouldn't be smart.

[Nikia]

14. In high school, I had that problem

When I look back on things, I am glad that I didn't committ myself to some guy in high school or become promiscous but at the time I was upset that I had a hard time getting a date with someone who I'd want to date. There may have been other issues at hand, but I was told by several high school guys that I encountered that they didn't want to date me because they had no interest in dating a woman who was smarter than them or a higher achiever. Getting straight As, being the leader scorer on the quiz bowl team, and frequently answering questions in class seemed to make my intelligence rather obivious. I also excelled in track. When I discussed the issue more with a guy who was a friend, he said that few guys want a woman to outshine them. They want to be their woman's hero and be the competent one, not the other way around.
I went to a competitive college and met a lot of nice, intelligent guys who didn't seem to mind smart woman. The one who I am married to is a bit stronger in some areas while I excell in other areas, but we both did similarly on IQ and all the national standardized tests.
Having dated a below average student in high school for a while, I can honestly say that it is much better to be married to a man who is my intellectual equal. Knowing other intelligent woman, I think that intelligence in a man is one of the things that we are most attracted to.
I think that the issue might work both ways. Many intelligent women are less atracted to less intelligent guys. Many men want to date women who wil judge them as more competent. Intelligent women have a smaller dating pool. I think that we might be more picking too since we might be less likely to "need" a man to feel fullfilled or make a decent amount of money. These are generalizations, of course.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. When I was in academia, I knew many intellectually well-matched couples,

but I observed an equal number of marriages in which a highly intelligent man had married a visibly stupid woman. I did not see one marriage in a highly intelligent woman had married a visibly stupid man.

There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few months ago about the shortage of marriage partners for academic women, especially those teaching in small colleges in small towns. That describes me for most of my thirties. :-(

At this point I'm at what one of my Portland friends called "that awkward age," too old for the men who decide at age 55 that they want children after all, and too young for the men who want to go to Arizona in their RVs and sit in a trailer park with other old people. (Frankly, I think I'll always be too young for that bunch.)

[highlonesome]

17. emotional quotient

Well for one thing, intelligence ain't everything. There's also what's sometimes referred to as "emotional quotient" which is a measure of a person't emotional perceptive abilities and abilities to connect on an emotional level with others.

While this woman may have appeared "visibly stupid" to you, she may also have been a wonderful match for this man on an emotional level. When one is choosing a lifetime partner, this aspect as a trait can be much more important than the ability to solve complicated math problems or quote Shakespeare.

Another general theme I see developed on this thread and even more so on the lounge thread relating to the same topic, is the idea that either A) if a woman is highly intelligent she doesn't want to "settle" and that the majority of men aren't worth settling for, or B) men in general are afraid of intelligent women due to their male egos and feelings of inadequacy when faced with a challenging woman.

Ever stop to wonder why any guy would want to commit to a lifetime partner who looks down on him like that?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. Well that's the thing, I wouldn't commit to a lifetime partner

whom I couldn't respect. I have actually been pursued by men who think that they're great catches simply because they earn a lot of money. However, I want companionship, not a meal ticket, and for companionship, I need an equal, not someone who will start to feel resentful that I know more than he does. (Don't laugh. It has happened to me. The male ego is overly sensitive, and very real. I was once dumped because I became so interested in my boyfriend's hobby that I knew as much as he did about it. He felt that there was no more he could teach me, and that threatened him.)

I've had some encounters with men who are married to "visibly stupid" women, i.e. when they come on to me, complaining about how their wives are so boring. In most cases, they didn't marry them because of "emotional empathy." They married them because they were 22 years old and thinking with their dicks, to put it crudely. (I've observed this phenomenon over years of watching college students pair off, and I've seen some of the most amazingly disastrous combinations.)

[highlonesome]

19. I feel for your ex

Sounds like he really missed out. It's not too often that one can find a life partner who's not only smart, but perceptive of everyone else's shortcomings as well.

So what was the hobby?

[alarcojon]

40. Professional Women

I know, as a professor, that professional women tend to have a difficult time finding a mate. For academics in particular, many women stay single throughout the long slog to the PhD, some even until tenure. By then, they are at an age where many men find them too "old."

The problem is especially acute for professional women of color, a major contributing factor being the fact that they significantly outnumber professional men of color.

[ProgressiveConn]

20. I think that

much of this has to do with being intimidated by a woman who is smarter than themselves. As a guy I've always been more intimidated by intelligent, educated women than by physically beautiful women.

Guess that means I'm more secure physically than intellectually. =)

[highlonesome]

23. looking for different things

I think i's a pretty easy dismissal to say that men are intimidated by intelligent women. I think that intelligence isdefinitely on the list for most men, but not prioritized as highly as it is by women when looking for a mate.

The way I see it is this: In our culture it is typically seen that women are the primary source of emotional bonding, intimacy, and comfort. So in effect, women can gain emotional support from a man -- if she's in an intimate relationship with him -- or from other women.

On the other hand, men are mainly tied to women for emotional support whether it's his wife, mother, girlfriend, etc. So since a man can get as much intellectual stimulation as he needs mainly form other men, other women,or work etc, he doesn't value a high intellect in a woman as much as he values emotional availability.

I'd hazard a guess that if the same study was done correlating EQ (emotional quotient) that a direct correlation would be found that women who score more highly are much more likely to find marriageable partners.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. And women don't seek emotional compatibility?

You're talking as if the intelligent women who aren't getting married are going around with a specific I.Q. or educational level or even job title on their shopping list.

Not so. (Now I've known some airheads who go around saying, "I want to marry a doctor," or "I want to marry a lawyer," but I'm not talking about airheads.) If one is a heterosexual woman, there's a kind of emotional intimacy that one can get only from a man.

I've met plenty of highly intelligent and wealthy men whom I wouldn't even go out with because there's no correlation between I.Q. and/or educational level and emotional compatibility. What I look for is a certain mindset, a sense that we are on the same wavelength, the kind of relationship in which we could almost be an improv comedy team. To me, that is the sexiest thing in the world, trumping looks, money, and social prestige.

Of the two men that I had this kind of mental connection with most recently, one was gay and the other married. So that was the end of that.

I totally agree that emotional compatibility is more important than I.Q. points. But emotional compatibility includes understanding and respecting the things that are important to the other person.

As I have observed a lot of other people's relationships over the last 30 years, I"ve noticed that there is a certain type of man who wants to be admired and tended to by an adoring geisha rather than loved by an equal. That Bloom County quote above is right on. He doesn't want an idiot who will shame him in public (after all, geisha are trained in the traditional arts and are expected to keep up on current events so that they can talk to anyone), but he doesn't want anybody who endangers his position as the supreme star and most important person in the family.

We don't mind admiring a man--in fact, I want someone I can admire, but as Peter Cook, playing the devil in the original version of Bedazzled says in explaining why he rebelled against God, it's frustrating to be the one who is doing all the worshipping. My ideal would be someone who had strengths that I don't have and who was willing to respect my strengths as well.

But Flannery O'Connor was right.

[highlonesome]

29. Not what I'm saying

Of course women seek emotional compatibility. What I'm saying is this:

Women have multiple sources for emotional intimacy in their lives:

From their partner and also from most of their female friends. Since this is the case, women don't seek to prioritize an abundance of emotional availability from their men -- of course they want it, but in many ways women have been trained not to expect too much of it!

Men are trained to expect one source of emotional availability and intimacy in their lives: From their partner.

So if this is the case, if a man is faced with balancing high intellect or high emotional availability, he's likely to choose emotional availability, since it's basically his one shot at having it.

What I'm saying is not that women don't want it, but that men prioritize it higher.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

30. Oh, no, women prioritize emotional intimacy very, very highly

Many of us don't need men for financial support, so what's the use of having them around if not for emotional intimacy? Besides, the kind of emotional intimacy one has with a man is different from the kind one has with relatives and female friends.

Where we differ is that I don't see how it's possible to have real emotional intimacy with someone who is significantly less intelligent than one's self. I'm not talking about I.Q. points, either, but about complexity of thought processes and breadth of interests.

I've seen some marriages in which one partner was less intelligent than the other, and the marriage broke up because either the more intelligent partner became embarrassed by the ignorance of the other or the less intelligent partner became jealous and resentful of the intelligence of the other.

I am suspicious of the motives of men who say they want a less intelligent or less accomplished woman for "emotional intimacy" --the ones who seem to assume that emotional intimacy is impossible with an equal or that it is more possible with an inferior, the ones who dated only undergraduates or even high school students when they were in graduate school. (My gentleman friend's roommate dated a high school student.) Yes, there were graduate student men who bought undergraduate social fee cards so that they could go to undergraduate dances. God forbid that they should date women of their own age and educational level.

The prevailing idea was that grad school women would automatically be cold, arrogant, or unattractive, and it was infuriating to us.

I suspect that "emotional intimacy" is the last thing on their minds. It seems more that they are echoing the sentiments of the eighteenth century literary figure Samuel Johnson in believing that, "A man is in general better pleased when when he has a good dinner on the table than when his wife talks Greek."

In other words, they want someone who will take care of the messy details of their life in a competent manner, be presentable in company, and be just intelligent enough to admire them. They're not actually looking for a soul mate.

[Jackie97]

21. That sucks!

I better find a way to get used to not being married since it's least likely for me.

Unless there's some single male DUers reading that don't feel threatened by a smart woman.

LOL.

[TexasSissy]

24. I wonder if there's a correlation between a woman's IQ and her appearance?

That is to say...I wonder if the study took into account other factors that may apply to high IQs, such as appearance? Is it possible that while not always, there is more of a focus of women with high IQs on career and intellectual pursuits, and less a focus on appearance, so that the group as a whole is less attractive physically? A woman with a high IQ in med. school - how likely is she to go out partying on Friday night in plunging neckline with push-up bra, compared with, say, a secretary who is looking for excitement on the weekends? Neither one or the other lifestyle is better than the other. I'm just thinking that the two IQ groups may have different priorities.

Just a thought that there may be other differences in the two groups besides just IQ.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

25. True, but men who choose their wives on the basis of a push-up bra

deserve what they get. :-)

[TexasSissy]

27. Looks count in reality, don't they? I mean, I'm attracted to a man

right off the back if I'm attracted to his physical appearance. Then I worry about getting to know him. It's the same way in the animal world. Appearance is very important in attracting the opposite sex. The good news is that what someone finds physically appealing is a personal thing, sometimes. Not everyone finds the same person equally attractive.

There's nothing wrong with emphasizing one's femaleness or maleness in order to attract the opposite sex. I looooove the maleness in men, and if they want to accentuate their slender hips, muscular arms, or whatever....I notice. Can't help it. I think it's biological.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. I wasn't talking about noticing someone for the first time...

I was talking about making looks an absolute priority in deciding whom to marry.

[TexasSissy]

31. Well, the article is about smarter women having more trouble

finding mates. If they're less appealing physically to start off with, they will meet fewer men. Can't "mate" them if they can't meet them.

[shrike]

32. You're missing out on a lot if you go by looks alone

Some of the most attractive men I know aren't handsome or even particularly thin. I also know drop-dead gorgeous guys I wouldn't walk across the stree to talk to.

[SarahB]

34. I don't think...

People should judge a women's mind based upon to what degree she fits within certain culturally defined images of beauty either in the positive or the negative. Most professional women (or students of demanding fields) do not have the time, energy, or motivation to get drunk and party on Friday nights, but many are physically attractive nonetheless (often because they are intelligent enough to care for their health and well being on a long term basis).

[legalcoffee]

33. Maybe I'm not as smart as I thunk I was...

I was involved with an attractive man that was my emotional and intellectual equal… Like I said he was an attractive man but not one that I personally had an initial attraction to. The end result, a two way “let’s just be friends pact.”

[kslib]

35. I think, therefore I am single.

:evilgrin:

[Logansquare]

36. This just in: Stupid women aren't particularly picky n/t

[lapopessa]

37. Maybe it's just the Brits

I'm with those who know far too many well matched smart couples. Where's the survey that says brainy men face handicap in marriage stakes? Where's the survey that says men over 40 are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than wed. I'd settle for one single survey getting wide press that upsets male expectations.

Media seems to love to tease and torment smart or older women whenever possible. Anyone see the 60 minutes story that seemed to leave the idea that women who didn't have children were less than they could or should be?

There's some pretty steady women-bashing in what the media chooses to report.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

38. There definitely is a double standard

Unfortunately, it does not seem that brainy men face a handicap in getting married as long as they're not so geeky as to be socially crippled. Many of them are content to marry "down" in intelligence, while brainy women usually are not.