With the best will in the world let's hope their pre-nuptial agreements

With the best will in the world, let's hope their pre-nuptial agreements are all in order.'She has more book-learning than I do, but I'm well-educated in a backwoods way'Sindi, 35 (right with Rex), a production editor of a newspaper, earns approximately pounds 40,000 a year. Monroe divorced Miller after four years; Roberts and Lovett lasted less than two years; Christie Brinkley ditched Billy Joel for the distinctly more uptown Rick Taubman; Schiffer and Copperfield are no more. Meanwhile, Eva Herzigova and Tico Torres are poised to tie the knot. How many young women really have sugar daddies? The average 18-year-old woman wants a 20-year-old, not a 50-year- old-man with a Ferrari."Down-dating, it seems, is a short-term answer to particular needs. "We did a survey of 1,300 British married couples and found that the attractive marry the attractive, the rich marry the rich, and most are in the same age range Similarity is the general rule. It is much rarer for an intelligent woman to be satisfied with a less stimulating man.

While men have been trained to rate looks at a premium, women are more likely to value personality. "There's more social stigma attached to a woman dating a dumb guy or a man with no means," says Fonarow. If a woman does "down-date" it is as a recourse, when her male peers are "taken". According to Robin Russell, lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths' college, down-dating is a minority phenomenon. "An academic might get stimulation elsewhere, but needs a mate to be a good mother and housekeeper. Those kind of traditional roles will work out if the wife has similar expectations." Woe betide the wife if she does a college degree, or like Melanie Griffith in Born Yesterday, she wises up.

"Then the couple's unspoken equilibrium is jeopardised," says Dryden. Many professional men who claim to want their intellectual equal end up marrying someone less bright or ambitious than themselves."Men don't necessarily need a woman to be intellectually stimulating," says Professor Windy Dryden, psychotherapist and author of How To Untangle Your Emotional Knots (Sheldon Press). "In a society that posits that men are supposed to be more intelligent, it takes a very secure man to go out with a woman who outshines him intellectually. If you pick someone less smart you can have a sense of mastery or dominance, hence older men with younger girls," says Fonarow. A less attractive man can match a beautiful woman in terms of wealth and status - witness MPs and businessmen pairing off with models. Until Madonna celebrated the toy boy in the 1980s, it was much less common the other way round, but now with increased earning power and economic status, women too are taking pretty boys for good sex and social decoration.What is less quantifiable and more tricky is the question of intelligence. Ugly men learn how to treat a woman well in a way she likes and make her feel attractive," says Wendy Fonarow, a teaching fellow in cultural anthropology at UCLA in Los Angeles.