I used to have a friend who was always exhausted, and no wonder. Brilliant and tenacious in the workplace, she had risen to a prestigious job in television, and had two young children. But she also had a husband who, she knew deep down, didn’t want a working wife.

So she tried to pretend not to be one, always looking adorably feminine in lipstick and fluffy little cashmere numbers around the — impeccably run — house, throwing elegant networking dinners to boost his career and generally striving to ensure he felt cared-for at all times.

Didn’t work, of course, he left her anyway. However, her story goes some way to support the recent claims of American journalist Maureen Dowd: that women get less desirable as they get more successful.

Dowd tells me her article in The New York Times prompted the film star Ethan Hawke to invite her out for a drink, so he could pour his heart out on the subject. He had been married to a “really strong woman” (Uma Thurman), he told her, but it’s so hard when both of you have the Y chromosome. “Someone has to make the hearth.”

This awful realisation — awful, at any rate, to hard-working, career-minded women — has been filtering through to the surface for some time. A recent study of college students at the University of Michigan discovered a trend: the men wanted long-term relationships with women in subordinate jobs.

Stephanie Brown, who carried out the research, attributed this to “evolutionary pressures”: it’s hardwired into the male DNA, apparently, to minimise the risk of raising offspring that are not their own, and working women with independent lives outside the cave (sorry, home) have more opportunity to cheat.

But Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of Baby Hunger, which highlighted the fact that increasing numbers of professional women are childless, doesn’t think you need to look far to see why the lustre is rapidly being rubbed off the idea of being part of a “power couple” for today’s young adults.

“The drivers are what’s happening at work. It’s become increasingly difficult to have what we dreamt of having in the 1970s: even-stevens. That’s because we underestimated the pressures coming out of our workplaces. I think it’s even harder than it was 10 years ago to pretend you can go full steam ahead in your career when you have children.”

The hours people have to spend at work are on the increase, adds Hewlett, and if you’re not actually in the workplace, you’re connected to it by the wonders of mobile technology so you can be “got at” 24/7.

“Jobs have ratcheted up in their demands,” says Hewlett. And the result: “If you work 70 hours a week, you don’t want someone else working 70 hours a week as your mate.” As an investment banker once told her: “I’m a predator — why would I want to team up with another predator?” Quite. Or as Hewlett puts it: “Because careers are much harder couples are making decisions about mates and life patterns that really have this traditional tilt to them.”

And the hard rain of workplace pressure falls just as punishingly on many teachers and health-care workers as on the investment banker who can support a wife whose “job” is looking after him.

In other words, girls, don’t waste your speed-dating sessions on a résumé of your latest sales-conference triumphs.

You’re better off adopting a policy of “be sweet, be nice and say about a quarter of what you really think”.