Her Beta Half

In a documentary on Lady Gaga, she talked about how whenever she reached a new pinnacle of success, her boyfriend or fiance left her. It happened three times. My most recent boyfriend couldn't handle it when I started to become successful. Are my options to be successful and alone or unsuccessful and loved? How do I find someone who won't feel threatened?

--Disturbed

It's often hard for a man who's achieved less than the woman he's with. She introduces him with "Meet my boyfriend..." and he imagines everybody finishing her thought with "...the man whose job it is to eat treats out of my hand like a squirrel." Wave hello to "precarious manhood," a term coined by psychologists Jennifer Bosson and Joseph Vandello for how a man's social status must be continually earned and "can be lost relatively easily" through public failures and the exposure of his shortcomings. We rack up our social standing in comparison with others. So, not surprisingly -- in line with research I recently cited about men's freakouts when they were told a woman beat them in every category on an exam -- Bosson and Vandello write that "feelings of masculinity can be undone" by "being outperformed by a woman." The reality is, the world is not our dating oyster. (Atheists have to take a pass on the hot churchgoers. The teetotalers go poorly with the "social crack smokers.") Accept that success narrows your options, and concentrate on meeting men in places the honchos (or at least the highly successful) hang out. (Price points -- like costly admission to a charity event -- are one way to weed out many of those of middling achievement.) Narrowing the field this way should make you less likely to hear dismaying parting words from a man -- those that basically translate to "I have mad respect for your success. My penis, unfortunately, has some ambivalence."