Or it could be that not everyone wants to get married

Nah, that couldn't be the reason that as women's IQs go up, their "shot" at getting married goes down, as this study purports.

Of course, for the purposes of pitying women who are so smart they can't get anyone to marry them, we have to assume that women are naturally inclined to marry the first guy who asks. Now, as you can imagine, I know a lot of unmarried women I'd stick into the high IQ category, if I were a gambling woman. And I am. (I especially like craps.) I can tell you straight up that they aren't married for lack of male attention. They are unmarried because they don't want to be married, at least to anyone they've met yet. It's certainly not for this reason:

"A chap with a high IQ is going to get a demanding job that is going to take up a lot of his energy and time. In many ways he wants a woman who is an old-fashioned wife and looks after the home, a copy of his mum in a way."

Um, people tend to marry people like themselves, as a general rule. They marry into the same race or income bracket or religion or whatever is important to them. Again, as an outside guess, I'd say that intelligent men tend to fall for intelligent women. Sure, there's always going to be the subset of men that find intelligence threatening and those who are less interested in love and more in appearances or being coddled, but I'm not putting their numbers as high as this study's authors might like to do.

"Women in their late 30s who have gone for careers after the first flush of university and who are among the brightest of their generation are finding that men are just not interesting enough," said psychologist and professor at Nottingham University Paul Brown in The Sunday Times.

Probably closer to the truth. If there is a trend, my guess is that a lot of intelligent women, having fought for respect and individuality their whole lives, are wary of putting themselves on the line in the way that is expected of women who marry. I know bright women who have turned down marriage proposals or broken off engagements simply because they felt stifled by a man or felt like he was preparing to take them for granted or because he simply wasn't all that compelling, if you really think about it. In a culture where women are expected to subsume part of their personality in marriage, you're going to find a lot of women who just reject the institution outright, or, more likely are playing wait-and-see for a man who adamantly opposes traditional expectations of wives.

Thanks Fred.