"To generalize roughly: women want their partners to be at least as smart as they are, but men prefer to have something of an edge on the woman."

"A very smart man — someone whose name you would recognize — once told me that in looking for a wife, he made a list of qualifications, one of which was that she be 'almost as smart' as he is. Now, maybe he only meant that he knew he was so incredibly smart that the most he could hope for was someone 'almost as smart,' but I think he meant that he wanted smart, but he didn't want to be outmatched. He wanted to feel dominant. If this pattern of preference is followed by most people, the men at the bottom and the women at the top will have the hardest time finding partners. Too bad! One more reason to favor the equality of the sexes: more people will find mates. If the theorizing in the previous paragraphs is true, however, maybe the smartest women will embrace the unmarried state happily. In that case, the ones who are hurt the most are the least intelligent men, whose true equals have been snatched away by dominance-seeking men who have outwitted them."

The last paragraph of a post I wrote in 2005, about "a study that supposedly shows that 'a high IQ is a hindrance for women wanting to get married,'" which I was reading this morning after noticing in my Site Meter record that someone had entered this blog on that page (after Googling "what is the more reason why women with high iq found it difficult to get married").

If you go back and read that old post, keep in mind that my first marriage broke up in 1987, and my second marriage began in 2009.

ADDED: The Site Meter record shows the Googler came from inside the Miller Brewing Company. It's funny to think the search related to beer-brewing somehow. Perhaps some theory for marketing beer... to women.