A recent research study showssome  that men feel terrible when their female partner succeeds in the same endeavor that they aspire to.

The study, which questioned 896 heterosexual respondents, showed that men subconsciously suffered from low self-esteem whenever their female partner succeeded in the same field or endeavor, even if they were not directly in competition with each other. In contrast, women tended to feel happier in the relationship whenever their male partners experienced success.  

Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study tested the subconscious feeling of college students. After being told that their respective romantic partners scored high in a "test of problem solving and social intelligence," the respondents were asked to undergo subconscious testing. With their girlfriends belonging to the top 12% of examinees, men alarmingly revealed that when a girlfriend succeeds, the man felt less confident, his self-worth suffering a blow. Though the men did not readily admit to this fact, they associated themselves with the adjectives "dreadful" and "bad" as their subconscious reaction to their partner's success.

The women, on the other hand, were unaffected or seemed happier with the news that their male romantic partners did better than them.  

In her report, the study's lead author, Kate Ratliff (University of Florida), explained that "there is some evidence that men automatically interpret a partner's success as their own failure; as men tend to be more competitive than women." On top of this, gender roles may also be at play in this perception of men, as the male gender is stereotypically expected to do better than the female.

Similar experiments were also conducted online, at the University of Virginia and in the Netherlands by Ratliff's team, with the findings quite similar as the first study they conducted. Men tended to feel "dreadful" and terrible whenever their female partners succeeded at an endeavor that they failed in, be it social or intellectual.