An Economist's Guide to Love

What do you get when you mix psychologists, economists and speed-dating? No, it's not CW's latest reality show (though it totally should be), it's an interesting study on what people *actually* look for in dating partners. Slate has the story here, but you can find the actual study here. The results are less that surprising.

We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner's beauty, when choosing, than women did.

By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women's choices as men's. It isn't exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter—but only up to a point.

When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.