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You can solve complex calculus equations, expound on the relevance of the Battle of Thermopylae, and diagnose enigmatic blood disorders (without the help of WebMD).

You’ve more than earned your smarty pants.

Just one problem—you have a hard time slipping out of those smarty pants and into the arms of an inamorata. (That’s smarty pants talk for lovah.)

Why is it that men and women who are the most educated, most accomplished, and most intelligent seem to have the hardest time dating?
As one of my brightest friends, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, recently lamented, “I guess I just want the best and have a hard time overlooking the things about people that annoy me! It is really starting to settle in, however, that I am likely going to be single during my time at Cornell.”

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According to Dr. Alex Benzer, author of The Tao of Dating books, brainy folks may be too smart for their own good when it comes to matters of the heart.

In an article for The Huffington Post, Benzer posits that, “the smarter you are, the more clueless you will be, and the more problems you’re going to have in your dating life.”

So why do intellectual whiz-kids fare worst romantically?
First, Benzer says, smart people often grow up in families focused on academic achievement rather than relationship building: “Time spent studying, doing homework, and practicing the violin is time not spent doing other things like chasing boys or girls, which turns out is fairly instrumental in making you a well-rounded human.”

This describes my family—and lack of early dating life—precisely. But I’m glad my parents prized intelligence over dating triumphs. It saved me a lot of wasted time wooing teen geeks. And made me an interesting person worthy of wooing adult geeks.

As Tina Fey said in a May 2008 interview with Marie Claire, “You know what? Let the boys practice on other girls. Let them treat other girls like crud, let them learn how to French kiss for, like, ten years, let them give some other girl a bunch of crappy Valentine’s Day gifts, and then you just move in when they’re fully formed.”

But Benzer says fully formed brainiacs can have a tougher time with romance than young smarties. He says as adults, smart people often limit themselves to dating other high IQ individuals, thus eliminating 95 percent of the dating pool.

But wait—isn’t it true that smart men will date dumb women, as long as they’re hot?

“They won’t tolerate it after about seven minutes,” says one Ivy League grad I spoke to. After a brief pause, he added, “Okay, they’ll tolerate it long enough to have sex, but then they get bored.”

“My really smart female friends, in general, are less willing to tolerate stupidity in the name of sex,” he says.

Sounds numbingly familiar. So what are we clever lonely-hearts to do?
Well, there’s always Mensa. That’s right, in order get to the bottom of this dating dichotomy, I called in the big brains.

I asked Elissa Rudolph, a thirty-year Mensa member from Delray Beach, Florida, and Michelle (who preferred we not use her last name), a thirty-two-year-old single Mensan from Atlanta, to share their wise-girl dating experiences with Betty.

Betty: Do you date intelligent men exclusively?
Elissa: “I joined Mensa because I wanted to meet interesting men, and I even married a couple,” says Elissa, whose two ex-husbands are both Mensa members. “But what draws people to one another isn’t their IQ, it’s some sort of chemical reaction.”

Elissa’s now dating a man who’s not a Mensan, although she says he probably could qualify. “What I was looking for was a warm, nurturing man who was also manly. I’ve found one and I’m hanging on to him!”

Michelle: “I wouldn’t say I would limit myself to only the top five percent of the population, but I definitely need to be with someone who is intelligent and who can challenge me and have a good discussion. I don’t think, however, that it necessarily limits the dating pool.”

“We meet people most frequently by doing things that interest us. Someone who is very into sports may prefer someone else who’s extremely athletic and also into sports,” she says. “Similarly, someone who is extremely smart … gravitates towards other smart people.”

Betty: Do you think being a smart woman has hindered your dating life?
Elissa: “There’s a little bit of a bias in men against smart women, still, even after all these years. But really, it’s just one more challenge.”

Michelle: “No. I think that when it comes to dating, attitude and personality play a role more than IQ.”

Betty: So is intelligence just a convenient scapegoat for being single?
Michelle: “I think it’s … human nature to want to figure out why you’re not successful at something that others appear to be successful at,” she says. “You look for answers as to why you’re not in a serious relationship when the rest of the world looks like they’re happily ever after. So we tell ourselves something like, ‘It must be because I’m smart.’”

Betty: Is it ever awkward revealing to a man you’re in Mensa?
Elissa: “One guy in particular, as I was explaining [about Mensa], his eyes just kind of glazed over. I knew I’d lost it, I knew I would never see him again. But I can’t lie about it. I wasn’t saying, ‘I’m so smart.’ I was just explaining what the organization is,” she says with a laugh. “But I knew that he wasn’t going to call back.”

When she explained her Mensa membership to her current partner, she says, “His eyes didn’t glaze over, so I knew I had a chance there!”

Michelle: “I once met a guy in a bar and we were chatting and it came out that I was in Mensa. He seemed surprised, but we kept chatting. A little later I said something that was perhaps a bit airheaded and his response was, ‘That’s right, you people don’t have a lot of common sense.’ For a variety of reasons (not just the one comment), we didn’t end up going out.”

“One guy I dated was clearly shocked when I first told him that I was in Mensa – he physically backed up a few feet and sort of gaped at me. However, he then said it was cool and he’d never known anyone in Mensa. After that it was something that he seemed kind of proud of and would good-naturedly tease me about from time to time.”

Betty: So how do smart women get ahead in the dating world?
Elissa: “You really have to know yourself before you can get to know somebody else. Having an IQ doesn’t necessarily mean you know yourself any better than a person with an average IQ,” she says, reiterating Benzer’s advice to “loosen up.”

Michelle: “Being intelligent can help dating … you have interesting stories and opinions to share that may help you land a date. But there may be side effects of being intelligent that can hinder dating. The trick is to understand how your personality and other characteristics both help and hinder you socially.

What do you think? Is dating harder for smarter people? Has being smart woman hurt your dating life?

Why Approaching Women Sets You Apart

Is Dating Harder if You’re Smarter?

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