Meet 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 years earlier by a man who told her she was intellectually intimidating. For a break-up line it seems fairly believable. After all, Dr. Whelan is a successful author, journalist, and commentator who has taught at Princeton University and has been published by the likes of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She is exactly the type one would expect to see leading the campaign declaring that men are frightened off by smart women. At the very least she should be among those applauding Maureen Dowd’s 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, a controversial tome charging that men just want women who will be content to take care of all their needs. Dowd's view was that, "Guys want to be in relationships with women they don’t have to talk to," and that, "females are still programmed to look for older men with resources while males are still programmed to look for younger women with adoring gazes."

Her own breakup experience notwithstanding, Christine Whelan strongly disagrees with Dowd’s assessment. Whelan’s 2006 book, Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, explains that "when women buy into gender-based stereotypes of what a man is looking for in a woman, they not only insult the men they are trying to attract, but also give off negative vibes about their own self-confidence." The reality, according to Whelan, is that men do make passes at women with glasses—the marriage market has been changing and Dowd’s claims are at least two decades out of date. While we all may be attracted to an adoring gaze, we’re much more attracted if that gaze also reveals underlying intelligence and the kind of character that has the potential to lead to success, whatever our definition of that term might be.

To be fair to Dowd, it must be acknowledged that she probably had little good news at her disposal with which to counter the old stereotypes. Today's media files are swollen with newsbytes warning that women who spend too many 'marriageable years' pursuing education will find they've missed the marriage boat entirely. Even some of the largest news sources in the country have accepted this fallacy. One of these, Newsweek Magazine, has only recently apologized for its famous hyperbolic prediction that single, 40-year-old women had "a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married." Intended as a joke, this statement has been repeated so often it has become indistinguishable from fact. The apology is too late, the lie has caught on, and there are few now who question the belief that women who delay marriage to pursue higher degrees may be educating themselves out of the marriage pool. So why is Dr. Christine Whelan swimming against the media tide?

To Whelan, the idea that she and others like her were single because they were ‘too intelligent’ to attract a man no longer seemed plausible. "It’s a flattering explanation, isn’t it?" she admits, "But it’s just statistically not true."

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