Earlier this year, Sherri Day of The New York Times covered the story of the Harlem Club and its founder, Thomas Lopez-Pierre. The Harlem Club is a gentlemen’s club of sorts, aimed at hooking up professional black and Latino men and women. Men desiring to join the club must be professionals who pay $5,000 to become a charter member of the club, or $2,500 to become a regular member. Women join the club for free if they pass the following bar of standards: be college-educated, under 35, single, childless and submit a head-to-toe photograph.

The Harlem Club aims at addressing a pressing concern within communities of color about finding mates. Increasingly, black and Latino men and women find their peers do not share their level of achievement in education and career status. The more education and status one attains, the smaller the pool of potential dating partners who match those achievements.

Successful women of color deal with this problem in a larger quantity. Although men often date, and even prefer, women with less status than themselves, they are much less likely to date a woman who has achieved more than them.

The issue is well-documented. The March 3 cover story of Newsweek read, “From Schools to Jobs, Black Women Are Rising Much Faster Than Black Men; What It Means for Work, Family and Race Relations.”

My experience here in Iowa paints the national picture well. With its practically homogenous population and cultural isolation, the communities of color are small. In accordance with the national trend, black men are in lower supply than most other populations. Thus, in economic terms, they are in high demand — among all women. As a result, their standards of achievement can be low because “they don’t have to.”

Black men have the potential to demand and attract any woman by nature of their unique quality, without putting in much effort at all. When black women are not willing to “settle,” black men find comfort in other women who are willing to “settle,” and, even further, willing to placate. The population of women who attend college for the sole purpose of finding a mate is still thriving; most black women in college don’t have that luxury.

Further, the pre-packaged image of beauty is of a thin, white woman with a tan. The image sells on television, billboards, magazines and even food labels. What every man has to have looks nothing like me. Thus, non-black men are not interested in the beauty found in black women either; it’s just less than ideal.

Nowhere does success and achievement factor into the equation when men choose their mates. It’s not necessary. White men and women have a supply that meets their demand, black men get what they want because they are in high demand and it would take too much sacrifice and consideration to think about successful black women.

This leaves us in a state where 1) Successful black men and women aren’t hooking up with each other, and 2) Successful black women go alone.

Now, Mr. Lopez-Pierre’s solution is to impose high monetary standards for black men (a decent concept) and to impose more stringent social and physical standards for black women — as if we don’t already have enough pressures to change and conform to mainstream ideals of beauty just to get a decent date. Recall that there are no physical requirements for the men in the club, simply money. So men can pay their way out of image standards?

The March 3 issue of Newsweek stated that, of any gender-race combination, black women are the least likely to marry outside their “race.” Do black women choose this because of some sense of obligation to the future of black communities? Or do they simply fail to attract partners because their beauty is not praised as worthy womanhood?

One man developed a solution to the problem: Lay the blame on black women, and require more sacrifices on their part. No standards for the marital status of the male club members. No questions asked about how many children the male club members have created.

Mr. Lopez-Pierre fails to remember that black women do not become a part of the single black mother epidemic all by themselves; try to impregnate then abandon yourself sometime. Pretty difficult.

Clearly, we have a real problem in the state of “black love.” But putting women on the beauty pageant auction block is not the solution.