Wise wives: are clever women getting better at dealing with their dimwit husbands?

Rejoice! Science has discovered, according to a new report, that it’s now OK for men to marry women who are cleverer than them. Men are ‘evolving to cope with cleverer wives’ is how new research from the American Sociological Review is being presented in the popular papers.

In other words, if you’re a man married to a clever woman you need no longer feel all shrivelly and inadequate when she says something incisive about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: you can simply smile admiringly and bolt another gulp of your gin and tonic. As Margaret Thatcher’s husband Denis, a pioneer in this field, put it: ‘Better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you’re stupid than open it and remove all doubt.’

Nowadays, the househusband is a more or less acceptable figure. When my own dad was a househusband in the early 1990s, he got some funny looks. Now you see great flocks of them — of us! — ambling around North London parks with their papooses and their smugness. Those friends of mine whose wives are the chief or only breadwinners, far from seething with resentment, are as happy as clams. My wife and I, both freelance, take turns breadwinning and home-making, and no shame attaches to either.

As for the internal dynamic of our relationship, does a disparity in cleverness cause us difficulties? On paper at least, I am cleverer than my wife. I was a swotty boy who won scholarships and went to Oxford. I have the sort of brain that is quick to take on board the distinction between an amphibrach and an alexandrine, and the sort of personality that thinks this might be important.

On the other hand, I am almost pathologically incapable of thinking about organising a cat-sitter more than 24 hours before we are due to go on holiday; and my ‘clever’ convictions about the meaninglessness of sell-by dates, the questionable value of medical treatment for minor injuries and how sensibly toddlers can be trusted to act around paddling pools are tested by reality and found wanting far more often than my notions about classical scansion.

The greater causes of marital discord, then, are practical rather than intellectual. I tell you, disagreeing over whether mathematics was discovered or invented, or the game-theoretical implications of traffic queues, are nothing compared to disagreeing over whether it was a good idea to change the baby’s nappy on the carpet without thinking to put a changing mat underneath him first.

My wife has a good degree, but she wasted some of her time at university interacting with other humans. In consequence she boasts not just one, academic, intelligence but a whole range of intelligences: emotional intelligence, practical intelligence, organisational skills, low cunning, the ability to winkle out uncomfortable truths, and rhetorical dexterity, aka the ability to win arguments on which she is plainly — plainly! — in the wrong.

That in itself should indicate one reason to treat the findings of this research — or at least the conclusions we leap to — with caution. It’s not very easy to measure ‘cleverness’ scientifically — don’t let’s get started on IQ tests or that club for pretentious thickies, Mensa. What the research in the American Sociological Review actually looked at was the comparative degree of educational attainment. The sociology of access to education over the past 50 years — and the reasonable assumption that native ‘cleverness’ isn’t gendered at birth — suggests that a lot of these apparently clever-man-stupid-woman marriages will actually have been between a stupid man with a degree and a clever woman without one.

Nevertheless, something measurable has changed. ‘Wives with more education than their husbands were once more likely to divorce than other women,’ say the researchers, ‘but this is no longer the case.’ In the 1950s and 1970s, they found couples were a third more likely to divorce if the man was less well-educated than his wife. Not any more. Good news for actor George Clooney, who is soon to marry the multi-degree-holding London barrister Amal Alamuddin.

What can it mean? Perhaps it is that men are getting better (not ‘evolving’: evolution doesn’t do much to the human species in 40 years) at relating to women who are cleverer than them. It could equally well be concluded, though, that clever women are ‘evolving’ to cope with being married to stupid men: something that will give encouragement to bluestocking-fancying himbos everywhere.