Alice Giddings
Published December 2, 2025 4:19pm
Updated December 2, 2025 4:20pm
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Have you got what it takes, like these brainiacs? (Picture: BBC / Getty / REX)
You may be familiar with Olivia Attwood’s Bad Boyfriends on ITV, which puts naughty lovers to the test, but what about an exam for good boyfriends?
Well, now there is one, thanks to academics at Oakland University in Michigan, who determined that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to have a successful romantic relationship.
It seems self-explanatory, but it goes against the longstanding grain in popular culture, which so often sees the self-proclaimed nerd struggle to ignite or maintain a romantic connection.
Take the quiet but dashing Emmet Richmond from the iconic flick Legally Blonde. He’s spent years at Harvard with his head in a book and struggles to reveal his true feelings to the dynamic (and pink) Elle Woods.
Then you have the likes of Sherlock Holmes who finds himself a perpetual bachelor, with his romantic life taking a back seat in favour of solving the latest true crime mystery – even when he yearns for Irene Adler.
Nonetheless, it seems those with brains make the steadiest boyfriends, according to research published in the journal of Personality and Individual Differences.
The smarter they are, the better boyfriend material, just like Emmet Richmond (Picture: Tracy Bennett/Mgm/Kobal/Shutterstock)
But it’s not enough just to be kind of smart, being a good boyfriend correlates with a specific type of intelligence – spotting patterns and completing sequences known as ‘letter number series items’.
The better men were at solving these patterns, the more likely they were to have a greater commitment to their relationships and to be faithful, and less likely to insult their partners.
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They were also less likely to desire power in a romantic relationship, as well as coerce their partners into sexual activity, or resort to ‘mate-retention’ tactics like making you feel guilty so you stay with them, or gaslighting you into believing an argument was your fault.
This intelligence was even associated with a lower likelihood of erectile dysfunction and psychopathy.
Now, you might want to take this with a light dusting of salt because lead researcher Gavin Vance doesn’t want to oversell the results. This is largely because only 202 heterosexual men (in relationships six months or longer) were subjects in the study – a very small pool of data.
Smarter men were more likely to be faithful and invested in their relationship (Picture: Getty Images)
The results also rely on each man’s level of honesty about their own conduct (but just because your idiot of an ex-boyfriend lied doesn’t mean they did).
Your partner being smart doesn’t mean everything will work out perfectly, though. Research from the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo also shows that the brainier a man is, the more likely he’ll be to have kids later in life.
So, if you’re someone who wants a baby in your 20s, this could throw a spanner in the works, given the guys in the study who scored in the top 20% for cognitive ability had their first child at 30, while the bottom 20% became dads aged 27.
In fact, there’s been a 14.2% increase in births to fathers aged over 60 in the UK since 2023.
If you’re not in a rush to start a family though, this specific type of intelligence could mean your relationship is more likely to be successful.
So, boyfriends, why not try and answer these three questions to see how you fair on the intelligence test? Or girlfriends, why not get your man to take the test?
If romance really is dead, as they say, we may as well be practical about it.
The three questions
Let us know your score out of three in the comments below…
What comes next in this sequence: D4, F6, H8, ?
What comes next in this sequence: 6F, 12I, 24L, ?
What comes next in this sequence: 2W, 4T, 7Q, 11N, ?
Get your thinking cap on blokes, your relationship depends on it (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Scroll for the answers…
Now, for the big reveal, what did you score out of three?
The answer to the first sequence is…
J10
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The answer to the second sequence is…
48O
The answer to the third sequence is…
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