Have you ever noticed that smart women tend to stay single way longer than the general population? It seems weird since theoretically, our intelligence should help us find love more easily. However, the truth is that being brainy can work against us in love and relationships in many ways. Here’s why we roll solo much more often.
- We’re great judges of character. Smart women are pretty good at reading people, which protects us from a ton of bad situations. Once we recognize a red flag from a guy or he exhibits some kind of problematic viewpoint or behavior, we’re outta there. Many of us are single much longer than we’d like to be because we never fall for the fakeness that many guys put out when we first meet them. It’s a blessing and a curse!
- Men consider our intelligence a turn-off. According to a study cited by The Guardian, a woman’s marital prospects decrease by 40% for every 16-point rise in IQ. Shocking, right? But not quite as shocking as the fact that the exact opposite seems to be true for men. For every 16-point rise in a man’s IQ, he becomes 35% more desirable to women. And they say misogyny is dead.
- We tend to prioritize career ambitions over relationships. Smart women tend to be ambitious. Maybe we want to write a book or start our own business, or maybe we want to become surgeons or professors. Whatever the goal is, we can be pretty single-minded when it comes to achieving it, meaning love and relationships often get moved to the back-burner. It’s not that we’re against love, just that we don’t prioritize it, making it harder to find (and keep when it does come along). Because of this, we tend to stay single much longer.
- We don’t put up with BS. A study of 121 British participants found that smart women are seen as problematic in heterosexual relationships because their intelligence comes off as masculine, threatening, and undesirable. The same couldn’t be said for men, of course, but I suppose that’s because smart women won’t put up with men’s crap. We call out lies, BS, and bad behavior without hesitance, so of course that’s going to be “problematic” to a guy who thinks he’s going to get one over on us. Ugh, who wouldn’t prefer to be single?
- We refuse to settle. At the end of the day, smart women stay single for as long as it takes to find someone who’s on our level and who wants to truly be an equal partner. We refuse to settle for anything less, and why should we? We know how much we have to offer as women and as partners, and we’ll wait until we find someone who’s worthy of that before we couple up.
