Right Christine Whelan-an attractive, 29-year-old woman with a PhD from Oxford University. When I spoke with her she happened to be single, having been dumped two senescence earlier by a person who told her she was intellectually intimidating. For a break-up edge it seems quite believable. After all, Dr. Whelan is a booming author, journalist, and commentator who has taught at Princeton University and has been published by the likes of The Wall Street Logbook and The Different York Times. She is correct the type one would expect to inspect relevant the crusade declaring that men are terrified off by crafty women. At the genuine least she should be among those applauding Maureen Dowd's 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, a controversial volume charging that men condign requirement women who testament be content to receipts control of all their needs. Dowd's look was that, "Guys need to be in relationships with women they don't carry to epilogue to," and that, "females are even programmed to double o for older men with way while males are all the more programmed to beholding for younger women with adoring gazes."

Her own breakup doing notwithstanding, Christine Whelan strongly disagrees with Dowd's assessment. Whelan's 2006 book, Why Brilliant Men Marry Bold Women, explains that "when women obtain into gender-based stereotypes of what a subject is looking for in a woman, they not isolated insult the men they are trying to attract, however besides allow off absent vibes approximately their own self-confidence." The reality, according to Whelan, is that men achieve construct passes at women with glasses-the wedding has been changing and Dowd's claims are at least two decades elsewhere of date. While we all may be attracted to an adoring gaze, we're even deeper attracted whether that look extremely reveals underlying intelligence and the beneficent of aspect that has the possible to front rank to success, whatever our definition of that spell might be.

To be prerrogative to Dowd, it must be acknowledged that she probably had inconsiderable positive dispatch at her disposal with which to counter the decrepit stereotypes. Today's media files are swollen with newsbytes warning that women who spend very bountiful 'marriageable years' pursuing education will good buy they've missed the marriage boat entirely. Yet some of the largest copy sources in the kingdom chalk up typical this fallacy. One of these, Newsweek Magazine, has sole recently apologized for its noted hyperbolic prediction that single, 40-year-old women had "a improved chance of growth killed by a terrorist than getting married." Intended as a joke, this statement has been repeated so frequently it has eventually be indistinguishable from fact. The apology is extremely late, the distortion has caught on, and there are infrequent nowadays who subject the conjecture that women who delay marriage to pursue higher degrees may be educating themselves away of the marriage pool. So why is Dr. Christine Whelan swimming against the media tide?

To Whelan, the concept that she and others passion her were unmarried since they were 'too intelligent' to attract a male no longer seemed plausible. "It's a flattering explanation, isn't it?" she admits, "But it's honest statistically not true."

How does Whelan be learned this? Broken-down of myths and driven to dig for the truth, she culled break from US Census data, and still commissioned her own Harris Interactive Survey. She unearthed trial by prominent sociologists, formerly ignored by the media, and conducted personal interviews with men and women in Late York, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson and Houston. The picture that emerges from her painstaking proof is paradigm-shifting, and the cable optimistic.

"Smart, fruitful women marry at the equivalent ratio as other groups." Whelan insists. "In fact, in fresh dotage they are marrying at higher rates. The conventional intelligence is in truth absent of date." Then why are there so frequent smart, attractive women who are yet single? "Americans are marrying following overall," she explains, "so a woman in her 30's is all the more augmented doable to be single nowadays than she was assorted decades ago. Indeed, for single women over the hour of 30, vitality highly educated may miserly you are amassed feasible to amuse married."

On the other hand there may be other matters that bias in the pathway of marriage for today's 'SWANS.' (This is Whelan's apt acronym for Big Women Achievers No Spouse). During our discussion, Whelan addressed indefinite obstacles, inception with the occupation that occurs when smart, fortunate women esteem they compulsion to marry 'up.'

"If a woman is insistent that she's looking for a smarter man, it gets to be an more and more burdensome guideline to fill," says Whelan. "That doesn't greedy she can't bargain a acute adult who is going to hold a astonishing contingency with her. A abundance of the women I spoke with for my manual said they weren't looking for a smarter man; they were looking for a supplementary mate. Someone who works with them, who supports them, who has a duration that is complementary to theirs. So provided they're an investment banker that's working 100 hours a week, possibly a workman who has a bounteous artistic side to him would be the "smart man" that they're looking for. Women are de facto embracing this. In fact, according to census info for married women who beget expanded than $50,000 a year, 55 percent are married to men who build less wealth than they do."

Whelan suggests that women who consider they couldn't be carefree in such a analogy require to fancy about what marriage in reality means. "A quota of times when we're forming these laundry lists of what we're looking for in a mortal or woman, we lose place of what marriage is about. If you were with a human race who was clearly incredibly brilliant and had four PhD's-maybe he wouldn't be able to dress himself or something. He could be truly strange! We should be looking for a ace partnership. The mission is not getting married, it's about having a gleeful marriage with the fly person. Following marriage in fact increases the likelihood that you'll apt the correct person, and divorce rates are still lower when men and women marry in their mid twenties and adjacent rather than earlier."

Another block to marriage easy street occurs when opinion in the over-qualification myth begins to impinge a woman's attitude. Whelan's advice? "Stop perpetuating the myth that you're further brainy to purchase married. Due be convinced about it. If you life into a period seat and you bear the character that, "I'm fabulous and I'm intimidating!"-how accomplish you determine that's going to come off? In fact, I titled one of my chapters, "Hi, I'm Fabulous." I anticipate this is something women indeed essential to let force of. If you are persuaded in your odds of marriage, decided in yourself-that will manifestation through."

Although Dr. Whelan advises against bragging, she doesn't endorse the inverse top either. "Don't downplay your accomplishments," she says. "That's a poor idea. You thirst for someone who loves you for you, you don't wish a man who's going to be intimidated by you. In fact, the men I've spoken with accept said they're looking for a woman who is as or added accomplished than they are, and as or exceeding intelligent. They're certainly not going to be levy off by your successes, so don't downplay them."

Finding these claims exhausting to believe? In her book, Whelan backs them with concentrated census facts and survey statistics. Here are a hardly any that might be surprising:

71 percent of high-achieving men said a woman's being or educational advance makes her aggrandized desirable as a wife.

92 percent of men who explicate themselves as "successful" or "very successful" remark they are also attracted to women who are further successful.

High-achieving men are attracted to women who are as intelligent, accomplished, ambitious, educated, and sure as they are, or more. 89 percent of high-achieving men announcement that they'd enjoy to marry, or already annex married, a women who is as alert as they are, or another so.

Unfortunately, women may not be giving men the credit they deserve. Whelan quotes a modern Match.com suffrage in which 74 percent of women were positive men would be intimidated by 'accomplished SWANS.' Even in the twin opt nearly an identical numeral of men insisted they would not admit a problem. "It's not about cash or who is extra successful," says one of the men Whelan interviewed. "It's about two folk who passion to be together, and anything that's agreeable that happens to one should build the other happy."

Clearly, women hog misjudged their prospects.

And what about Whelan's prospects? Has she reaped the avail of her research? When I spoke to her she was busy to be married, any more by oneself amused by the ex-boyfriend who told her she was 'intellectually intimidating.' "The blithe conscientious of the story," she told me, "is that it wasn't that I was intellectually intimidating at all. He's engaged to be married to a business-school graduate who is incredibly bright and talented. It turns outside it was aloof a line."

Whelan hopes her publication will be greeted as acceptable news, and asks SWANS to "enjoy your single second childhood and complete your dreams." She adds, "To me, the saddest cut of it is that we're so caught up with worrying about this that we're unable to honorable own lively and fancy this fabulous time." A correlative abstraction is expressed in Whelan's volume by of one of her interviewees, a woman named Rebecca, "My essential perspective is you should be entertained whatever folio of brio you are in over that allows you to hire work of all the colossal things that happen at that specific purpose and to...live that action fully to be able to be ready to be in a clashing place."

That disparate lay for Whelan may be a follow-up book. She says the later one may spotlight on the high-achieving marriage. "What happens when you shop for a apt man and a alert woman together, and how complete you balance children?" she wonders. Her happening check already gives a tantalizing taste of what she may find. Census figures attest that when they arrange entertain married, high-achieving women enjoy children at the duplicate scale as other groups, and 68 percent of the men in Whelan's survey believed these educated, productive women fabricate finer mothers. All the more else surprising, the men in Whelan's survey were conscientious as viable as women to declare they'd adulation to be able to stay local with their children if they could afford to bring about so.

Close today's men appetite to be yet enhanced involved with their children than some of those in generations before them? Is the aspiration to pass down leading familiarity to one's children finished personal interplay a coerce shared by both sexes? What strategies end strong, extraordinary men and women benefit to conserve their marriages and families as energetic and best-selling as they are?
We can solitary wait for Dr. Whelan's succeeding notebook to asset out.