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When women put together a list of attributes they want in a partner, good looks, kindness, and a banging career probably are at the top of the list. How important does intelligence rank in your desired partner attributes?
A survey of 200,000 adults from Lehmiller found that 49 percent of men and 44 percent of women include intelligence in the top traits they want in a partner.
As a matter of fact, the participants rated intelligence above good looks!
A similar study conducted in Australia of 383 adults, supported the above finding that intelligence is important for a lot of folks. Men ranked intelligence as their top desired quality, with humor being three on the list. Humor was number 1 for women (53%). Although researchers found that people claimed to be attracted to people with high levels of intelligence, it wasn’t necessarily cited as a turn on.
The scientists rated sapiosexuality, or the idea that we are literally turned on by people who are smart, with a few questions to measure attraction. The scale included items such as “listening to someone speak very intelligently arouses me sexually” and “a very high level of intelligence in a partner is necessary for me to be attracted to them sexually.”
What they found is that sapiosexuality didn’t play as big of a role in arousal as you would predict.
That means our desire for intelligence may be more rooted in what intelligence can mean for us in terms of earning potential, success and achievement, not necessarily something that arouses us and makes us bedroom ready. Other social scientists argue that we may have an evolutionary impulse to breed with smart people to pass along those genes to future generations.
Other valued character traits include facial attractiveness (women, 12%) and dependability (women, 19%). Men included partner age in their top ten, perhaps because they are looking for women who are still within child bearing range.
