Dating Around and Marrying Smart

“Love in 90 Days” by Diana Kirschner, PhD

• The great mathematician Frederick Mosteller has shown that you will maximize your odds of finding the best possible spouse if you date about 37% of the available candidates in your life, and then choose to stay with the next one who is better than all the rest. Any other strategy, whether choosing earlier or later, will significantly decrease your chances of success. For example: Suppose you expect to meet 100 potential partners in your lifetime. If you marry the first one, your chances of having found the best one are 1/100. If you wait to the last one, your chances are again 1/100. By sampling the first 37% of the total pool of candidates, not only will you learn about the various types of men and your responses to them, you will have entered the sweet spot of the probability curve where your chances are at their best. 
• 2009, Center Street Publishing, New York, NY, Pages 163-164
• Two recent studies conducted in Europe and Australia show that smart men prefer smart women and are happier for it. First, in a study of educational homogamy in marriage in 22 European countries, 14 countries showed a strong tendency toward homogamy, while in 7, the men actually married up! Second, the Australian study on 5,000 subjects revealed that men who married educated women are happier than those who partnered with uneducated ones. Furthermore, the author concluded that a man’s happiness level grew by 8% for each year of his wife’s post-high-school education. So, a college graduate brought he man 32% more happiness than a high school grad. In other words, solid research on marriage conducted around the world shows that the more educated women have become, the more attractive they are to the opposite sex.
• 2009, Center Street Publishing, New York, NY, Pages 225-226
• Christine Whelan’s Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women continued to explore this theme. In a Harris Interactive poll she commissioned 71% of high-earning or graduate-educated men said a woman’s career or educational success makes her more desirable as a wife, 68% report that smart women make better mothers, and 90% of high-achieving men say they want to marry—or are already married to—a woman who is as or more intelligent than they are. The men she interviewed said they were looking for an equal companion who could co-create the kind of future they want. Whelan concludes that smart women have both beauty and brains and are therefore more appealing. As Whelan says, “Gentleman prefer brains.”
• 2009, Center Street Publishing, New York, NY, Page 226

Given the prior blog post about how most men aren't ready for marriage until mid to late twenties, it is in a woman's best interest in her early 20s to pursue higher education.  Not only will it help her career but it will also make her more attractive and a better partner.