I have no desire to cause any trouble for anyone’s home life, but something’s bugging me after reporting my most recent MSNBC.com column. The column itself is a little complicated so I won’t bug you with its details, but it touches on something that’s troubled me before: how we pick our mates and the rather blatant prejudice with which we do it.

I’m not talking about race or religion. I’m talking about education. No kidding, it often seems that we stand a better chance of marrying a Jew if we are Catholic, or an African-American if we’re white, than we do if we have a law degree and the attractive person we’re eyeing went to plumbing trade school.

Interracial marriage is kind of hip and liberal. I mean, the tri (quad?) racial Tiger Woods and his Nordic wife are Ozzie and Harriet compared to any couple in a mixed marriage of high school diploma and PhD. Talk about segregation!

This helps explain why lawyers seem to mate with lawyers, creating more lawyers, or classics scholars breed children who go to Bard or Williams and write papers on Aeschylus.

Sure, a few years back, there was a spate of women, many of them writers, it seemed, who left New York or Los Angeles and their hectic media jobs and found love with cowboys in Montana, river rafting guides in Utah, or truck drivers on the open road. But these are glaring exceptions. (And if I recall correctly, shortly after the book or movie or New York Times article about the very satisfying sex to be had with hardworking men was produced, the relationships ended.)

Since I am man, I am going to find fault with women.

I know college and post-graduate educated women who decry male shallowness about looks — O.K., boobs and legs — who would never, not in one million years, seriously consider marrying a construction worker. One night stand, maybe. Marriage? Forget it. Sure, you like looking at the UPS guy in his shorts on hot summer days, but if you’re a professional, or highly educated, would you date him? Seriously?

When sociologists talk about people who marry those with less education, they use the phrase “marrying down.” Really. They say so-and-so “married down.” Ooh. Too bad. She married down.

There’s a wealth of statistics that show that since World War II we Americans simply do not marry down if we can help it. Before World War II, we were much more egalitarian. The fact that most women (most men, too) did not go to college before World War II may have had something to do with it.

But why did you marry (or why are you dating, sleeping with, flirting with, whatever) the man or woman you did? Was it really Kismet? Or was there some cold calculation that your education levels matched. I ask because sociologists also have a theory they call “exchange.” It says that love and marriage are a bartering of valuable stuff, not a magical moment built upon an old Bon Jovi CD and cheap vodka at a fraternity house. Education is a very big item of exchange. Looks are another. But education and future earning power often outrank looks. So if that man you are married to, sleeping with, dating, didn’t have as many years of education as you did, would you still have taken the leap? Might you have been happier with a sensitive van driver?

Just asking. Hey, nice legs by the way.

Check out Brian Alexander’s Sexploration column on MSNBC.com.

Alexander is also the author of America Unzipped.