Smarter Men in Marriage

Are the smartest people lucky in love?

Some evolutional psychologists have theorized that the <x0 strong body” may have evolved in part through a process called “sexual selection”. In other words, wise people may find it easier to pull their partner, maintain their stable relationships, and have children.

There is evidence that the most intelligent men are more likely to be married. However, this is not a very strong evidence of psychologists ' theory, for intelligent people, as we know, tend to marry in age. Maybe intelligent men get married at a very old age, not because they're smarter, but because they have greater access to resources? After all, we have known for a while that, compared with men, women value a partner who is ambitious, diligent, and has good financial prospects.

Is intelligence an important driver of the success of relationships or simply a guarantee of wealth?

Jaakko Aspara led a team of researchers from Finland and the US to find out. He used Finland's national statistics, linking IQ data collected by the Finnish Armed Forces (in which all young people were recruited), with data from the National Population Record Centre. The result: a set of data including IQ, the marital situation and the income of almost 190,000 males.

Before he found that men were more likely to marry (and remain married four years later) if they had high intelligence confirming the results of previous studies.

This was also true of information about the impact of a person's income on his marriage prospects. A man's wealth had an important impact on his chances of getting married. In fact, wealth was more influential than intelligence. However, an intelligent man was more likely to be married and married despite his wealth.

In further analysis, Aspara divided the results of the IQ into three components: verbal, logical, and numeric. Verbal intelligence was the most important form of intelligence when it was thought of marriage. Arithmetic ability had no effect. This makes sense in view that verbal capabilities are the easiest form of intelligence surveillance during association.

Other possible explanations of the findings are that fluent men are better able to convince a woman to enter a relationship.