Excerpt: 'Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women'

Oct. 16, 2006 — -- For years, there's been a popular conception that men are intimidated by intelligent women.

Thus, these women are less likely to find a man who will love them, let alone get married and have a family.

Dr. Christine B. Whelan shatters that myth in her new book, "Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women."

She proves that smart, successful women marry at the same rates as other women, assuring millions of American SWANS (Strong Women Achievers, No Spouse) that they have no reason to doubt themselves.

With sound research and sage advice, Whelan tells intelligent women why they have the upper hand in the marriage market -- and in every other arena of life.

Overqualified for Love?

Imagine, as newspapers and magazines recently have, the "plight of the high-status woman." She is a well-educated young woman in her 30s, earns a good salary, and has a great social life -- but she is single and is worried that her success might be the reason she has not met a man to marry. Any hint of bad news about the successful or talented has always made headlines, but media pessimism about the happiness and life balance of millions of young, career-oriented women has struck a chord nationwide.

The purported "news" was never good: Smart women are less likely to marry. Successful men are romantically interested only in their secretaries. And if a woman makes a lot of money, men will be intimidated. Conservative and liberal pundits alike mythologized the failure of feminism and the "waste" of these talented women who were searching for soul mates.

For a generation of SWANS -- Strong Women Achievers, No Spouse -- these myths have become conventional wisdom. If you attended a good school, have an impressive job, have career aspirations or dream of future success, men will find you less attractive. "I've been told by well-meaning relatives: 'Don't talk about work on a date, dumb it down, and it's bad to earn so much money because guys will be scared of you.' And I got the word 'intimidating' a lot," said Alexis, a 35-year-old lawyer in San Francisco.

She's not alone. Nearly half of single women believe their professional success is intimidating to the men they meet. Put another way, many high-achieving women think their success is not helping them find love. Some 66 percent of SWANS disagree with the statement "My career or educational success increases my chances of getting married."

Anne, a 30-year-old chief resident at a Boston hospital, said she doesn't think of herself as intimidating or uber-intelligent, but men seem to get that impression. "I was out with two friends from residency recently and I asked one of the married guys if he had any single friends to set me up with. He said, 'Oh, I get it, you're one of those super-smart superachievers that scare the men off.'"

"I didn't really know how to respond," Anne recalled of her colleague's character assessment, but other women have a strategy in place. They instinctually "dumb it down" or pretend to be someone they're not. When she was 35 and single, Julia, a lawyer in New York City, would play a game when she went to bars: "I told some guys I was an attorney and they ran away from me, and then other guys that I was a secretary at a law firm and at least for the short term they seemed more interested," she said. "There's the idea that high-achieving men don't like the competition, that they find us a little bit frightening, and get enough of that in the office. They want someone who is going to be at home."

This stunt became popular enough to inspire a Sex and the City episode. Miranda, the high-powered lawyer, tells a man she meets at a speed-dating event that she's a flight attendant. He tells her he's a doctor. Both of them are lying -- she to diminish her status, and he to inflate it.

The stereotypes are powerful, and many high-achieving women have created similar strategies. When Zara, a 26-year-old business school student, was an undergraduate at an East Coast Ivy League school, she and her friends used to fabricate identities that they assumed would be more attractive to men. "Senior year I spent spring break in Jamaica. My friends and I pretended we were from Southern Mississippi State University -- which doesn't exist as far as I know -- and put on southern accents to top it all off. We met all sorts of guys. We thought they'd be intimidated if they found out where we really went to school. They'd think we were argumentative, pushy, feminazis. Really, we're traditional in a lot of ways and are afraid of being judged negatively like that."

Given this prevalent conventional wisdom, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the romantic lives of accomplished women make front-page headlines only to tout bad news. "Men Prefer to Wed Secretary" announced UPI newswires in late 2004. "Too Smart to Marry" read the headline in the Atlantic Monthly a few months later. Newspapers throughout England, France, and Australia jumped on the bad news bandwagon in 2005: "Here Dumbs the Bride," "Keep Young and Stupidful If You Want to Be Loved," and "Alpha Females Use Their Heads, but Lose Their Hearts."

Finally, these negative ideas hit a saturation point in 2005, when outspoken New York Times columnist and feminist Maureen Dowd embraced this well-worn myth. In a series of articles and columns in the Times, and then in a book, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer asked plaintively, "What's a Modern Girl to Do?"

Spreading Myths

Ironically, it's two successful women, a well-educated and influential economist in her 60s and a pioneering journalist in her 50s, both of whom accomplished so much ahead of their time, who have done the most to scare off younger ones from pursuing similar paths to success.

In 2002, Sylvia Ann Hewlett presented a study of high-achieving women who weren't marrying or having children at the same rates as other women. In her book Creating a Life, she stoked the flames of panic among successful women: "Nowadays, the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child." She argued that high-achieving women who were still single at age 30 had a less than 10 percent chance of ever marrying.

Three years later, Maureen Dowd blamed her own single life on her career success. In her 2005 book Are Men Necessary?, Dowd told readers that she came from a family of Irish maids and housekeepers. Now in her 50s, she has achieved more than her great-aunts and grandmothers would have dreamed: She was one of the first women to have a regular opinion column in America's newspaper of record, she's written several best-selling books, and she has won the highest award in journalism. Writes Dowd, "I was always so proud of achieving more -- succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men."

These two books have had a profound effect on the way young, career-oriented women perceive their relationships.

Carolyn, 36, had recently ended a four-year relationship when the bad news books and articles began to garner large-scale media attention. She was getting anxious. "Should I be a little quieter? Should I listen more? Should I flatter more? Should I postpone talking about my stuff, should I put it off until he likes me for my personality? Should I laugh more? It feels fake, like a game, but I'm not sure what these studies are telling me to do."