Years ago, I had an intense relationship with a man who was brilliant and deeply interesting to talk to. I didn’t doubt he felt similarly toward me. But we had other problems, and we were constantly breaking up and getting back together until at last we ended things for good. One night, not long after the final rupture, we agreed to meet at a bar in the East Village with a few friends. He brought the woman he had begun seeing. I was curious what she would be like. A few minutes of conversation convinced me that he was not dating her because of her mind. But she was undeniably beautiful. I could see from my ex’s body language, from his effusive demeanor, that he did not bring her just to make me jealous. He was clearly smitten, happy to be with her.

I was envious. Not of her, but of him. He could be attracted to and, it seemed, happy with a woman regardless of whether he found her interesting. This was not an option for me. The thought of sleeping with a man I didn’t enjoy talking to, regardless of how good-looking he was, made me feel so lonely I could cry.

But that was only part of what bothered me. Seeing my ex enamored of this woman forced me to consider a question that was for me deeply charged: What if men didn’t care much about the kind of intellectual connection I valued?

I wasn’t so naïve as to have thought until then that most men valued intellectual connection above all else—I knew perfectly well that, when it came to women, most men seemed to value beauty more than anything. But I wasn’t interested in “most men.” What surprised me was that this was my ex, who had such a vigorous mind, such an appetite for both rigor and original thought. Yet even he apparently didn’t find intellectual compatibility with a woman essential, provided she brought certain other qualities to the table. Maybe the kind of mutual respect that meant so much to me was take-it-or-leave-it for him—not nothing, perhaps, but simply one offering on the buffet of choices, something he might opt for in a certain mood the way one might choose Ethiopian food one night and Thai the next.

Was he typical, even of men who are brilliant, in being capable of enjoying and inspiring that kind of intellectual connection? If so, what did that mean—for me, for my romantic prospects?

It’s one thing to think abstractly about what men want, as a literary or philosophical question, or even to decry sexism as a social phenomenon; it’s another to be a single woman in New York City seeking love and partnership, and to worry that what you have to offer is not especially desired by those you are attracted to. The fear I felt that night stayed with me for weeks afterward.

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I was reminded of this recently, when I reread Philip Roth’s 1977 novel The Professor of Desire. A relatively minor Roth novel, I read it again on a whim, for the same reason that I had picked it up the first time, years earlier, when I had been too young to make much of it: I was drawn to that title, that alluring title. What struck me this time was the directness with which the book tackles the question I wrestled with that night at the bar: What do men want?

The Professor of Desire is from that period in the Seventies when Roth was preoccupied with bright young men who, like himself in his twenties, were entangled in short, fraught and, evidently, emotionally scarring marriages to women he plainly thought unworthy of them. But unlike some of the other novels of this phase, in The Professor of Desire the bad marriage merely sets the table for the real drama. Free at last of the bad wife, the book’s protagonist, Roth alter ego David Kepesh, finds that happiness still eludes him. The novel builds toward Kepesh’s realization that he is bound to forever vacillate between two types of women he views as desirable, wholly satisfied by neither, at least not for long.

Option #1 is represented by Birgitta, a young woman Kepesh meets when he is on a fellowship to study in England after college in the early 1960s, before he marries. A “small, dark-haired, and … fetchingly buck-toothed” Swedish girl, Birgitta shares Kepesh’s appetite not merely for sex but for all manner of lewdness and kink. She begs him to pull her hair, hard: “I want to know you’re here,” she says. He calls her “his whore” and is

overcome by a passion whose harsh energies I have never allowed myself to begin to know before; or maybe it is that I have never known before a girl of roughly my own age to whom such forcefulness would have been anything other than an outrage. I have been so steeped in cajoling and wheedling and begging my way toward pleasure that I had not known I was actually capable of such a besiegement of another, or that I wished to be besieged and assaulted in turn. Straddling her head with my legs, I force my member into her mouth as though it were … the lifeline that will prevent her suffocation.

Kepesh and Birgitta spend a month hitchhiking through Europe, picking up girls for threesomes. At one point, Kepesh is berated at a bar in Paris by a working-class Frenchman, who accuses him of forcing his “wife” to submit to “indignities.” (Birgitta was being stroked under the table by a prostitute while Kepesh stroked himself.) Kepesh and Birgitta find the man’s ire highly amusing.

For all the loving detail we get about Birgitta’s delight in various sex acts, we learn little else about her. If she was, like Kepesh, interested in literature, the reader wouldn’t know it because it never comes up. If he enjoys her conversation, that likewise goes unmentioned. For Kepesh, Birgitta is all about sex. When his fellowship ends, he returns to the U.S. to resume his education—as a Ph.D. student at Stanford—“seriously,” that is, without Birgitta, for whom he apparently sees no enduring place in his new life.

Behind Door #2 is Claire, a pretty young woman Kepesh takes up with years later, after the debilitating marriage. Claire is the kind of woman who loves children and gardening and her golden retriever. A middle-school teacher at a Manhattan private school, she is organized and efficient, making to-do lists each day: “to every task that presents itself, regardless of how difficult or dreary,” Kepesh says admiringly, “she gives her complete attention, taking each up in its turn and steadfastly following it through to its conclusion.” She takes good care of him, making him fresh iced tea from her grandmother’s recipe, doing her best to cook Eastern European fare when his Hungarian father comes to visit. Claire, Kepesh thinks, is “simply irresistible.” That is to say: “no resistance is necessary. A tempter of a kind to whom I can at last succumb.”

In other words, Kepesh believes Claire is who he is supposed to want, in a partner, in a wife; wanting her is an indication that he has recovered his equanimity and good sense, after having been torpedoed by Helen, the one he married, who, in his estimation, had no redeeming qualities: Helen was neither sexually adventurous nor a good cook and housekeeper—just a beautiful, shallow, self-absorbed woman whom Kepesh became temporarily enamored of in spite of holding her mind and values in contempt. With Claire, in contrast, he doesn’t so much hold her mental capacities in low regard as treat them with bemusement, to be taken no more seriously than those of a child. They are not, certainly, the source of his attraction, any more than Birgitta’s were.

But boredom eventually sets in. In spite of all Claire “does so marvelously”—the cooking, the list-making—and in spite of Kepesh’s desire to be happy with her, he finds himself seething with “resentment over that little thing she will not deign to do … drink my come.” He begins to long not for Helen, who as far as Kepesh was concerned was good for nothing, but for Birgitta.

This longing and the dissatisfaction with Claire it represents sends Kepesh into his own personal hell. He has, it seems to him, discovered his fate: he is doomed, even when he is with a woman who satisfies many of his desires, to always want the kind of woman he doesn’t have. With Claire, or with a Claire—a good girl—he will eventually grow bored and want a Birgitta, and yet with Birgitta or her ilk he thinks he would be disgusted, both with her and himself, as Birgitta is, in his own eyes and in the opinion of his priggish (male) analyst, simply not good enough for a man of his exalted intelligence and obvious worth. (Kepesh is by then an accomplished professor of literature.) And so the book ends, with Kepesh knowing he will always be torn between the two apparently irreconcilable qualities he values in women.

That there might exist a third option—a different kind of love based in part on the kind of lively conversation Kepesh has with his male colleagues in the literature department and the attraction that might grow from that—is not entertained. That such a thing as intellectual respect for a woman to whom one is sexually attracted could be a basis for or even merely a component of romantic compatibility is wholly beyond the scope of Kepesh’s experience. It never occurs to him, or to any other character in the book, as a possibility, even to be considered and discarded.

What makes The Professor of Desire worth reexamining is the way it lays bare Roth’s belief that intellect is not merely of little romantic importance to men but is actually of no importance. With most Roth novels, you can tell yourself that maybe intellectual attraction simply didn’t come up in this instance, with this particular woman, but that’s not to say it couldn’t come up next time, with another woman. The Professor of Desire disallows that possibility. It purports to give us a window into the full range of Kepesh’s erotic desires, to make evident how profound and insoluble Roth believes his problem to be. Nor can Kepesh be dismissed as unrepresentative, as might be the case with other Roth protagonists. Mickey Sabbath, for example, was many things, but everyman was not one of them. Kepesh, on the other hand, is presented as a kind of archetypal male, who stands out only in being especially intelligent and especially honest about his appetites. He is, after all, the professor of desire, not merely of his own idiosyncratic preferences.

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Of course, The Professor of Desire was very much of its time. Middlebrow culture in the second half of the twentieth century tended to treat the emotional and sexual dissatisfactions of libidinally restless middle-class white men as synonymous with the human condition, and the natural (and highest) subject of serious fiction. Phrases like “virgin-whore complex” were bandied about not infrequently by (male) English teachers and popular intellectuals.

But a conception of love in which intellectual compatibility and mutual respect play a role is not some kind of new-fangled ideal, a product of now-voguish notions of feminism and egalitarian romance. Samuel Richardson’s novels Clarissa and Pamela, written in the mid-eighteenth century, center on female protagonists whose wit, intellectual rigor and moral seriousness continually awe their love interests, who are themselves morally flawed but appealing—or intermittently appealing in the case of Clarissa’s Robert Lovelace—in large part because they are the only men these women have ever encountered who are their intellectual (if not moral) equals.

This is not to say that such a conception of love was universal in eighteenth-century England. Richardson’s novelistic rival Henry Fielding was less interested in female intelligence. The heroine of Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous novel, is “good” in a traditionally feminine sense—kind, pious, chaste and beautiful. She isn’t stupid, but her intelligence isn’t much dwelled upon. To understand what drew Tom to her, we’d better look to those other qualities: beauty, kindness, etc.

These two ways of thinking about love—Richardson’s and Fielding’s—recur throughout classic fiction. Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway are more in the Fielding camp, with heroines who are appealing in ways that are traditionally feminine and wifely, while Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Trollope (who wrote of “equal mind meeting equal mind in equal talk”) are, in this regard, Richardsonian, emphasizing the intelligence—moral, practical and book-related—of their heroines. This is central, not incidental, to many of their novels: these aspects of the heroines’ characters are both what makes it difficult for them to find suitable love interests and key to what attracts their eventual matches.

There are also, of course, plenty of major writers who can’t be classified on this basis, whose ideas about love suggest an aversion to generalizable theories. These writers tend instead to present particular individuals who get their hooks into one another for all sorts of unpredictable and idiosyncratic reasons. Dostoevsky, James and Fitzgerald, for example, fall into this third category.

Literature, in other words, doesn’t propose one correct way to think about love—but it does tell us that being born a man in 1933, as Roth was, is not sufficient on its own to explain a lack of interest in female intelligence. Indeed, it’s striking how many of the most admired postwar American novelists shared Roth’s assumptions about love, given that the second half of the twentieth century saw a dramatic expansion in women’s formal rights as well as in ideas about women’s proper role in society. Bellow, Mailer and Updike all wrote incessantly about men who were primarily drawn to women for their traditional feminine qualities (looks, sex appeal, sexual daring, patience, tidiness, cooking ability) with little regard for intellect.

It’s fun to speculate on why such novels proliferated at that time—I suspect it has something to do with the rising cultural prestige of fiction during those years, meaning more men were attracted to it as readers and critics as well as writers, which in turn led to the production of a more masculinized literature. But what if our interest in the question is not one that can be satisfied by literary criticism or social change? What if, like my young self after that night at the bar, we are interested—deeply, urgently, passionately interested—in learning the truth from these books, not about literature or culture but about love?

In this case, the pressing question is not the extent to which Roth typified the conventional thinking of his day and what that means about the society he lived in but whether or not he was right about heterosexual love: Was Roth telling us a hard fact about men that some of us, particularly women who value intellectual connection, don’t want to be true but may well be?

Many would say yes. They might point out that writers like Richardson and the Victorians—Eliot, Trollope, et al.—are old-fashioned to a degree that is discrediting, and that Roth, as a sophisticated modern, undoubtedly knows better. Indeed, his point of view is widely shared in its broad strokes. I doubt I am the only young woman who was told many times, in many different ways, that my ideas about love as involving some sort of meeting of minds were naïve and unrealistic, and that in indulging such expectations I was setting myself up for disappointment. Are such people right that women like me would be better off accepting the truth about what men want and adjusting our behaviors accordingly (more makeup, gym-going and hair straightening; less reading or at least less emphasis on it in a dating context) as well as our expectations (i.e. that the non-beautiful among us should probably not expect to inspire great love, especially not from men who are considered highly desirable)?

For a long time, these questions preoccupied me. It felt as if my happiness hinged on the answers. Then I met the man I wound up marrying, and my personal stake in such questions waned. My husband’s presence served for years as constant proof of the fact that some men do in fact value intelligence in a romantic context, and for my own purposes, all I needed was to find one such man.

But I happened to reread The Professor of Desire—with its stylish and appealing articulation of what we might call the “realist” position—at just the moment when my marriage was coming to an end: in other words, at a moment when I might, once again, contemplate dating men, and thus have a renewed stake in the question of what men want.

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As I reread The Professor of Desire, one novel in particular struck me as a surprisingly apt riposte and counterpoint, even though at first glance it may seem so different from Roth’s novel as to render any comparison fruitless.

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was published in 1920, 57 years before The Professor of Desire; the difference in time between those two books is in fact hardly any greater than the time that has elapsed between The Professor of Desire’s publication and our own moment. And yet The Age of Innocence feels vastly more dated. If it doesn’t have quite the odor of mustiness of Eliot and Trollope, it does carry something of an odor nonetheless. Wharton’s novel not only describes a society that is old-fashioned and chaste, the book is itself those things—buttoned-up and proper, if not in subject then in language. Sex is only alluded to. And yet when you pull up the hoods, the thematic similarities between Wharton’s seminal novel and this minor Roth one are striking.

Both novels are organized around a man’s vacillation between two women, each of whom represents a type. When The Age of Innocence begins, Newland Archer entertains ideas as to the kind of woman he should marry that are, in spite of the differences in time and environment, almost identical to David Kepesh’s. In The Age of Innocence, the Claire character—the good wife/virgin—is represented by May Welland, Archer’s fiancée. May is someone Archer’s peers deem “suitable”: like Archer, she is from a “good” family. She behaves as a woman of her class is supposed to behave and would never do anything remotely scandalous. She is also wifely—loving, kind, competent at domestic duties. When the book begins, May seems to Archer to be the best of the best, the prettiest, the sweetest and most appealing of all the young girls in their set. Gazing at her at the opera in the book’s opening chapter, he feels keenly the “thrill of possessorship.”

Like Kepesh, Archer is an intelligent man; naturally he does not “wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton.” But nor does it occur to Archer that his wife should be someone he perceives as an intellectual equal. He looks for what Kepesh looks for in Claire, with her teaching degree, which is to say, both men believe the ideal wife should strike others in their social milieu as appropriate, respectable. They don’t want a wife who is vulgarly ignorant, even if it never occurs to them to look for someone whose mind they actually admire and are challenged by, or that this kind of intellectual kinship with a woman might (a) be possible and (b) have its own erotic appeal.

Just as Kepesh eventually becomes contemptuous of Claire’s penchant for snapshots and list-making, which is to say the limits of her limited intelligence, Archer realizes—too late—that May is a bit stupid. He stops reading poetry to her in the evenings because he can anticipate what she’ll say—and how off-putting he will find it: early on “she had simply (as he now perceived) echoed what he told her; but since he had ceased to provide her with opinions, she had begun to hazard her own, with results destructive to his enjoyment of the works commented on.”

But if both Claire and May conform almost exactly to the same feminine ideal, Wharton and Roth contrast these characters to alternatives that couldn’t be more different. For Roth, the (semi-)desired alternative is Birgitta, the whore, who delights Kepesh in bed but hardly seems (to him) like proper wife or girlfriend material. For Wharton, the alternative to the sweet and dull and wifely May Welland is a woman whom Archer is not merely attracted to but respects.

Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin, arrives in New York from Europe soon after May and Archer become engaged. She carries the taint of scandal with her. She had been married to a wealthy Polish count, who mistreated her in ways that are only alluded to. She has managed with some difficulty to leave him, but it is rumored that she slept with the young man who helped her escape. In their social world, a woman who has left her husband is bad enough; to have possibly left him for another man would be officially beyond the pale.

At first, Archer reflexively accepts the judgment of his peers; he resents that, because she is May’s cousin, he is obligated to be friendly to Ellen, to extend himself for her socially. Then he begins spending time with Ellen. His ideas begin to change. He realizes, for one thing, that he doesn’t care if she slept with the young man or not—after all, he himself had a number of affairs before May. Why is it worse simply because she is a woman? He also begins to nurse feelings for Ellen, whom he sees as a person of substance and whose ideas surprise him; the kinship he feels with her is very different from the tender, protective feeling he once nursed for dull, unequal May.

Unfortunately all this comes only after Archer and May have set a date for their wedding. Archer dreams of leaving May and running off with Ellen, but though she returns his feelings, Ellen refuses, insisting they not destroy May’s happiness for the sake of their own. Archer feels rebuffed—but also perhaps slightly relieved to have the choice made for him, to be excused from the necessity of doing something scandalous.

If Kepesh’s tragedy is that he is torn between these two types of women, wholly satisfied by neither, Archer’s is that he finds out too late that he would like to be with a person with ideas of her own, beyond what color to paper the drawing room walls. Archer marries May at just the moment when he realizes that he no longer cares for the wifely, girlish qualities that initially drew him to her.

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For Wharton the women who are appealing on feminine grounds but a little silly are contrasted with those who are worth taking seriously, as people, on the basis of their minds and characters; for Roth, the distinction is between women who are appealing in terms of two different, purely feminine axes: they are either feminine in a wifely way or they are feminine in the way of the sexpot, the temptress. In this, the books distill almost too neatly these two dichotomies for thinking about love.

Which takes us back to the central question: Who is right? Does Wharton’s novel disprove Roth’s? Does Roth’s disprove Wharton’s? Is Wharton correct that thoughtful, intelligent men, men like Newland Archer, are likely to view respect as an essential and necessary component of love, something as important as a pretty face or an appealing figure, or is this hypothesis a kind of wish-casting on Wharton’s part, something that appeals to those of us who want to believe men value women’s intelligence? Who is more trustworthy in their representation of the smart man: Roth or Wharton?

To be sure, Roth is somewhat out of fashion these days due to charges of sexism, misogyny, overly sympathetic portrayal of behaviors that are predatory and possibly illegal, etc., etc. But criticisms like these, though they might tarnish a writer’s public reputation, don’t necessarily alter our assessment of the accuracy of their claims. That is, many of us might think Roth is a “bad” person and nonetheless suspect that he is probably right about a lot of things, including the nature of male desire, in ways that are not unrelated to his being a bad person: his badness means he is not so caught up in trying to be good that he refuses to acknowledge the truth. Meanwhile, Wharton’s being a woman works against her on two levels—not only does she, by definition, lack first-person knowledge of what men seek romantically, she is, as an intelligent woman, likely to be biased. After all, who more than smart, heterosexual women have a stake in believing that intelligent men want intelligent women?

On the other hand, woman or not, Wharton is not exactly a writer inclined to offer comforting bromides for the sore of heart. She is, on the contrary, a notably hardheaded, even cynical writer, the kind who describes something as “romantic” as a wedding like so: “He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust.” And if The Age of Innocence has become a classic, it is partly because Archer’s evolution reads to so many of us—male and female—as plausible, believable. His dilemma would fail to move us if he came across as some sort of fake man, created by a woman for the purpose of self-soothing. (Roth’s depiction of the uncomplaining, constantly cheerful, ceaselessly libidinous and accommodating Birgitta is, in the opinion of this writer, far more vulnerable to the charge of authorial projection.)

Rather than settle the question based solely on the vagaries of gender and reputation, then, perhaps we should try a more empirical approach, and consider how well each of their perspectives stacks up against lived experience. Let’s turn back to that night at the East Village bar where I began to question in earnest whether smart men want to be with smart women.

My ex, it is clear, with his beautiful but rather empty-headed new girlfriend, did not behave like Newland Archer, who found a woman he felt to be substantial and underwent an internal revolution in the way he thought about love that made it impossible for him to derive much satisfaction from the company of a woman who had little to say for herself. Point, thus, goes to Roth. Which is, of course, why I was sent into a tailspin that night.

And yet. It’s also the case that my ex was no more like David Kepesh in his complete indifference to female intelligence than he was like Newland Archer. He had, after all, been drawn to me in large part because of our intellectual connection. Also, it must be acknowledged that I am less good and less appealing than Ellen Olenska in more ways than I care to list. At times I behaved badly in the relationship. As consoling as it might be for me to hang his interest in the other woman purely on his failure to properly appreciate female intellect, this may not tell the full story of the relationship and its dissolution. In other words this set of facts, upon closer inspection, doesn’t wholly discredit Wharton’s view any more than it wholly supports Roth’s.

Does this suggest that there is no way to answer the question? Are we bound to side with either Roth or Wharton based on nothing more than our preexisting predilection for one or the other position? For a long time, I thought this might be the case. Then it occurred to me that there may be less daylight between the two novels than there first appears, no matter how much daylight there is between the two novelists. After all, novels, if they’re any good, exist independently from their authors’ intentions, revealing truths about the world the authors may not have consciously embraced.

As we have seen, Roth attributes Kepesh’s problem to the irreconcilability of his desires, which he sees as natural, inevitable, an essential and timeless aspect of the human (that is, male) condition. What happens if we accept Roth’s depiction of his character and his unhappy fate—which I for one found convincing—but substitute a different explanation, one that is equally supported by the facts of the novel? What if Kepesh’s ultimate unhappiness was not incidental to but a product of his ideas about love, ideas that Archer was able to transcend but Kepesh wasn’t?

Maybe Kepesh is doomed to spend his life unhappily vacillating between two extremes not because, as Roth thinks, he is too intelligent to be satisfied by what satisfied lesser men, but because he’s too blinkered to imagine that another possibility exists. What if his sexism does not merely make him less good, according to progressive right think, but also makes him less happy because it prevents him from conceiving of possibilities that could have made a more satisfying kind of romantic life possible?

Perhaps the key difference between the Kepesh model and the one represented by Archer is in the way the men responded to the sexism they imbibed from birth onward. In both The Age of Innocence and The Professor of Desire, the protagonists’ desire for women who fit the virgin/wife archetype reflects what you might call the bigotry of different expectations, i.e. low expectations in terms of intelligence and high expectations in terms of conformity to feminine-coded qualities, such as docility and interest in domestic affairs.

Today, upscale, educated types live in a world that appears to be very different, romantically speaking. It is characterized by assortative mating—men and women with similar levels of accomplishment pairing off. On its face, this looks like a sea change: certainly the social and economic effects have been dramatic. Yet I’m not sure that, on a psychic level, this trend represents as deep a break from the past as we are apt to think: it is often just a changed definition of what set of boxes need to be checked—that is, what makes for a socially appropriate partner—not a change in the type of connection we think is possible.

When it comes to romance, some men remain, like Kepesh, dug in to sexist ideation. Others, like Archer, may begin with similar ideas but prove capable of being influenced by life experience—and the women they encounter. They come not only to believe in but to hunger for something richer and fuller than they had previously. Many are, like my ex at that moment in his life (and he was—we were—so young!), somewhere in between, apt to try out various possibilities, with no strong predilection as to what is likely to suit and thus easily blown on this or that course by circumstance, an especially beautiful woman (or one that accords more precisely with his own idiosyncratic desires) here, one with whom there is a deeper connection there.

Sexism operates differently on men and women. (Of course it does!) For women, it presents possible limitations on our own prospects; for men, it has the capacity to thwart not their own achievement but their expectations of half the world. That night at the bar, I felt like I was the one likely to be penalized by what I feared was the comparative indifference of so many men to the intellectual egalitarianism I valued so much. And I was indeed in the less enviable position in the short term. I was not wrong to fear my own prospects when I watched my ex dote on his new girlfriend.

It’s only now, decades later, that I have begun to wonder if, in the course of a lifetime, the reverse is true, that I was fortunate to know the kind of connection I wanted and to believe instinctively that it was possible, if not necessarily easy to find (or to keep). Men, it seems to me now, are not only subject to all the same difficulties of finding and keeping a partner but to one more besides: a kind of settling without quite knowing that one is settling—because one hadn’t been able, at the moments when it mattered, to imagine an alternative.

Art credit: Angela Fraleigh, Splinters of a Secret Sky: Splinters, 2021. Oil on canvas, individual painting from larger installation. 96 × 72 × 2 in. © Angela Fraleigh. Courtesy of the artist.