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I scored in the top fraction of 1% on the SATs, so I don't think I've ever met a woman who "scored a noticeable margin better" than me, but I have dated several women I consider my intellectual equals, and I am currently married to one of them (a successful lawyer who went to one of the best law schools in the US). I have broken up with women who I felt weren't able to keep up with me intellectually because I found them boring.
But you raise an interesting alternative hypothesis, which is that maybe women are the ones selecting "intellectually superior" men to date, and that's why they perceive all the men they date as "needing to feel intellectually superior," because they actually are.
@ArjinFerman
What I was getting at is more this, that for the average Mottizen there barely exists a dating pool of women smarter than him. Seriously, I feel like I'm about average in horsepower around here, and I've only met maybe a dozen women who obviously verbally intellectually outclassed me. So we're not ever likely to experience that kind of dynamic.
But there exist plenty of women who are substantially smarter than most men, and I've rarely seen that kind of relationship work well. My law school was located very close to another, less prestigious school. The boys who dated "down the hill" were mostly pretty happy with the results. The girls who dated townie guys mostly had these awful dysfunctions around it, where he didn't like to be made to feel inferior, and so would make fun of her for being an egghead and belittle her, and it would go downhill from there. The standard heterosexual dynamic is for the man to be in charge, that falls apart immediately if she is obviously much smarter. Women rarely find being smarter than their man sexy, men perceive this and lash out belittling her achievements, so on and so forth.
That said, I'll repeat that for the people saying this, it is generally cope. I'd expect the average woman to claim to be on the shelf because of her intelligence to lack above average intelligence, in the same way that I expect the average teenager who whines that his classmates don't understand him because he's smarter than they are to actually not be all that extraordinary. Non-measurable things used as self-justification are generally cope. I'm not that interested unless you have receipts for it.
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This seems to be another version of a fairly common trope about the dating market, which is that most women tend to date men that most other women tend to date, and those men tend to have qualities that most women find attractive, which are qualities that also either tend to be or correlate with qualities that they say out loud that men shouldn't take on. The "men don't want to get married" cliche largely seems to stem from this, from my view; where I look, there's no shortage of single men who are eager to settle down and get married, but there's a dearth of women who would even give them a chance on a date. On the other hand, the men that are getting dates from women tend to be men who, whether intrinsically or due to the female attention they've gotten, are pushed towards deciding that playing the field would be more beneficial to their lives than settling down.
It's even simpler than that (and applies to both men and women). Dating preferences are heavily correlated. If you find a single person who matches all the desirable dating preferences, they likely have other factors that make them unsuitable for a long-term relationship; otherwise, they'd have landed and stayed in one. The old saw "all the good ones are taken" is true.
This is why widows/widowers tend to be really good potential partners, despite the baggage of their partner's death. They became single through no choice of their own, but still have all the traits that make them a good partner.
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