Intelligence and Marriage
Even when you are settled in a marriage and know each other well, intellect can still cause trouble; just because you have a lot of intelligence on your spouse doesn’t meant the effect of mental intelligence won’t mess with your relationship. After a certain point, you or your partner’s mental gifts are no longer as impressive or helpful as they once were, or they’re more annoying than ever before. If you can’t adjust your expectations to accommodate the new market for your mind, then your marriage is going to become a mess. Don’t count intelligence a blessing until you assess its pressures, expectations, and how it could affect your marriage over time. You can learn as much as possible about your spouse, but gather intelligence early about intelligence and how it could impact your marriage in the long term.
Here are three examples:
• My husband is amazingly gifted, but as I discovered after we started a family, he’s also clueless about politics, his health, the way people feel, and the world outside his brain in general. He makes a good living and he’s a decent guy, but it’s hard to get him to take care of himself, and the older he gets, the more of an absentminded professor he becomes. My goal is to get him to be smart about the basics without fighting with him every time I need him to do what’s normally considered the bare minimum.
• I like that my wife is smart and accomplished, but she can’t seem to see that our son isn’t like her—he’s not stupid, but he’s more creative and visual than book smart and disciplined, and either way, he’s a nice kid whom any parent should be proud of. My wife can’t see beyond his handful of mediocre grades, however, so she’s after him every day to work harder and push himself more, and it causes endless conflict. My goal is to get my smart wife to be smarter about her kid.
• My husband is the smart one in our family, and I’m grateful for that, but it has always intimidated me. We’ve got great kids, and I do interesting things, but he’s the one who’s made the big bucks, and I realize after all these years, I’ve always deferred to him even when I thought he was wrong. I think he could tolerate some disagreement. My goal is to find the courage to stand up to him when necessary, regardless of how much I’m intimidated by his intelligence.
Marriage is inherently rife with high expectations, from believing that your spouse will one day remember to take the trash out and not expect it to walk to the curb by itself, to presuming you can stand to share a bed, bathroom, and, yes, beyond with this one person until your life (or at least The Simpsons) ends. The problem with living with intelligence in your marriage—be it your own or a partner’s—is that it can create additional expectations that are intimidating and distracting.
After all, exceptional gifts require exceptional accomplishments, and while they occasionally happen and make you happy, they more often make you feel merely adequate and worried about what you have to accomplish next and whether you’ll actually succeed. So don’t forget the priorities in a long-term relationship that never change, such as being a decent person, doing your share, being a good partner. Intelligence can be fit into that framework, not vice versa.
If you are married to an “absentminded professor,” it’s understandable to find the absentmindedness more disturbing and irritating (like Jerry Lewis, “nutty” or no) than charming and amusing (like eighties Eddie Murphy, his “nutty” days a distant nightmare). To those who work with him, enjoy his conversation, and require nothing more than his outstanding work and ideas, such a professor type is a pleasure to know and his partner should count herself lucky. To the partner who keeps him fed, clothed, and out of trouble while getting no practical help in return, it’s not so much fun and must often feel as if you’ve unfairly been promised a husband and wound up with an additional child instead.
You’d like to change the rules and find it hard to understand why someone so smart can be so dumb. If you had trained him from childhood, you might have been able to improve his habits of self-care, chores, and basic human interactions. Then again, your efforts might have failed because the absentminded-professor traits come not from poor parenting but potent genes that are too powerful to control.
After lowering your expectations, look for the important tasks you need help with that he’d realistically be able to take on; don’t think of what’s fair, but of what’s possible. Then ask yourself whether that behavior can be incentivized simply, using your power to control household supplies, major purchases, and recreational activities. If you need ideas and inspiration, watch a TV show featuring an animal-training expert, from whisperer to hunter, and take copious notes.
Finally, present your plan positively. Let him know that you assume he wants to take care of his share but his attention span often defeats him, so you’ve identified some basic tasks he can do and some tricks for capturing his attention and helping him remember. Put the plan into effect, proclaiming he will feel better if he can improve his contributions at home, and discourage further, distracting discussion. You can’t make an absent mind present, and resentment will probably drive it further into the mists wherein it dwells. What you can sometimes do is improve its management so it’s less absent and more aware.
If being intelligent makes your wife intolerant of your nonintellectual son and his poor academic performance, it can be hard to watch her criticize him without trying to tell her to stop. Your powers are limited, and opposing her directly may just make her feel that you don’t care about his education or value her efforts to help. If she can’t see that she’s doing more harm than good, find a positive way to credit her love and dedication while asking her to examine the negative effects of her actions. Your goal is to help her learn from experience without making her defensive, while simultaneously modeling a positive and supportive approach to your son.
To avoid possible miscommunication and a quarrel, try writing out your argument first. Begin by praising her commitment to trying to get your son to work hard and develop his mind, and assure her that you don’t think she or your son has failed. She has just demonstrated that his mind doesn’t respond well to school-based education and parental incentives, at least not yet.
Assure her that you share her standards and continue to hope that his intellectual gifts will develop as he gets older, but you will not be pushing him hard in the near future because such efforts have had a negative effect on his confidence and no positive effect on his learning. If she disagrees, tell her you’re eager to get advice from teachers and other experts.
If all fails, you may need to separate to protect your son (although your living apart, assuming she has partial custody, may offer him less protection, not more). With luck, your wife will accept that her efforts aren’t working through no fault of her own and credit your son with being a good kid despite the frustrations of not having her gifts. If not, you can hope that she will eventually agree with your observations and, until then, not feel she’s lost your support.
Intelligence can be intimidating, even after you’ve known and lived with someone for years, particularly if you’re a self-doubter and married to someone who isn’t. Initially, perhaps you hoped your partner’s certainty would rub off on you, but you realize it’s now time to develop confidence of your own.
You might hope to boost your intellectual confidence with an intensive course in quantum theory (or perhaps just a course of psychotherapy). In reality, self-doubt tends to persist no matter how much you learn about the external or internal universe, so you will probably need to develop an ability to phrase independent opinions even when you don’t feel particularly confident.
Begin by considering a current issue on which you and your partner disagree and which is important enough for you to take separate, independent action on if your partner’s views don’t change. Then, with the help of a friend or a therapist, research the issue as if you were preparing a judgment, and marshal your arguments. When the issue comes up again, be prepared to present your view, being careful not to express a need for him to agree.
Again, it
often helps to write out your position, especially if your natural shyness tends to make you panic in confrontations so you forget what you want to say. Don’t imply that he has stifled dissent or been unresponsive to your opinions, just state your own view, what you intend to do about it, and what you hope he will do about it. Then drop the subject without implying that you need him to agree or that you’re incapable of thinking and acting independently. You may never feel fully confident when you’re around your smart husband, but you can prevent your lack of confidence from interfering with your ability to say what needs to be said and acting independently when it’s appropriate and necessary.
You can’t help being intelligent and you probably can’t change the way you and your partner feel about it. What you can do is make sure intelligence-stimulated attitudes and expectations don’t make you stupid or intimidated, stop you from doing what you think is right, or add to the already-difficult goals of marriage so that they become impossible.
Did You Know . . . Truth, or Bullshit?
We examine widely accepted beliefs about relationships to determine whether they’re true (or not so much). The phrase in question:
“The heart wants what it wants.”
This phrase, made famous by Woody Allen before starting a life with his stepdaughter, is often employed by men or women to explain and justify stupid romantic decisions. It’s basically a way of taking the blame for leaving your husband for his brother, dumping the younger woman you left your first wife for, for an even younger woman, or, most pertinently to this chapter, exclusively dating pretty morons and passing the blame off from you to one of your organs. You didn’t mean to ruin your life and those of everyone around you, but your heart made a compelling argument—namely “Gimme!”
Lots of other things also want what they want—toddlers, dogs, Tea Party congresspeople—but that doesn’t mean they should always get what they want. If we can say no to them and their urge to fuck up our lives, even though they really want to play with that rusty knife, bark endlessly at the horse on TV, or bankrupt the world economy, you can as well refuse your heart’s yearning to completely fuck up your life.
So let the heart want as much as its little self desires, but empower your brain to keep those yearnings in check so you can keep your life from going ass up.
VERDICT: SUCH UTTER BULLSHIT
Looking for a smart partner seems like the smart choice, but even intelligence can’t outsmart the variety of complications that come with positive traits. The intelligence you really need is the smarts to see through each other’s bullshit, know when the other guy is right, and know when to speak up and when to shut up. What you don’t need is intelligence that glories in petty accomplishments or is good at fooling people, including each other. Even when the right kind of intelligence is part of the picture, you still need to be prepared to work harder to figure out whether your prospective partner is really the person he seems to be, and whether you’ll actually get along when you’re too tired, angry, or just overwhelmed to think straight, let alone near genius level.
What to Look For
What to Achieve/What Not to Be Fooled By
Mutual attraction
. . . that may include the pleasures of the mind, but doesn’t blind you to looking for actions that show character, commitment, and the ability to manage the parts of life that aren’t pleasurable at all.
Mutual respect
. . . for the way you learn from and help each other make smart decisions, and not for the combined total of your IQs and advanced degrees.
Shared effort
. . . in giving and seeking intelligent advice and making smart decisions, rather than in impressing each other with who’s right, more clever, and generally the smartest person in the room or marriage or world.
Common interests
. . . in each other’s accomplishments, intelligent choices, and working through tough problems together, rather than in showy cleverness and intellectual dazzle.
Common goals
. . . to manage work and family in ways you wouldn’t have been able to think of on your own, no matter how impressive or pedestrian your own intelligence may be.
Five Things to Consider before Deciding to Get a Divorce
1. Prioritize safety: If you think your partner is scary and mean, assess whether the risk of harm is real and immediate. If it is, it’s your job to protect yourself ASAP, not first figure out why your spouse gets so angry or what you can say or do to reduce the tension. The time to analyze his or her behavior is later (if ever); getting out and staying safe is more important than staying to talk things over.
2. List the essentials of a good-enough marriage: Considering all the marriages you’ve ever observed closely, from your parents’ to your old frat brother’s with his mail-order bride, ask yourself which ones never had a chance or were unhealthy and why, e.g., one partner didn’t do her share or was too quick to anger or only spoke Ukrainian. Then, if your marriage has one or more of those toxic qualities that make it substantially worse than living single, be realistic in considering whether your partner or you could make the changes necessary. Remember to distinguish between character, which doesn’t change, and behavior, which does (occasionally) (if someone tries hard).
3. Look at your decision through a business lens: List the pros and cons of marriage and divorce, putting aside negative feelings and focusing on the line items of dissolving a partnership, i.e., figuring out how to survive the splitting of assets and responsibilities and the increase in personal expenses. Compare security, income, savings, lifestyle, and parenting, as well as what you may have to sacrifice by going solo or single income, such as your nice house or your show dog.
4. Consider the logistics of leaving: You can’t give yourself a choice until you know what the choice will require and you can create and execute a realistic exit plan. If you think your partner’s idea of a fair split of possessions, custody, or child care isn’t likely to be the same as yours, then you need to know your state’s legal guidelines, the conditions that would prompt a judge to make exceptions, and the cost of legal help. Hopefully, all you’ll need is to find an affordable place to live that doesn’t screw up your commute or your kids’ school district. Never let fear prevent you from finding out what you need to do or to convince you that there’s no way to do it.
5. Explore therapy while acknowledging its limitations: Sure, a therapist can help you understand and speak more positively to each other, but when your communication Sherpa isn’t around, you’ll both usually slip when you’re under stress. Therapy may help you understand that what you don’t like about your spouse is part of the way he is, and that he would be that way with anyone, no matter how great his love and caring; but it probably can’t change him, leaving you to decide whether the marriage is worthwhile in spite of what you don’t like. Ultimately, therapy can’t change either of your personalities, but it may get you and your spouse to take your differences less personally, see what behavior needs to change, and assess whether such change (and staying together) is an actual possibility.
Chapter 8
F*ck Wealth
Unlike the other traits explored in this book, most people don’t see “wealth” as a quality to seek in a partner. In pop music, money is usually seen as an impediment to true love—it can’t buy love, it changes everything, it rules everything around you (at least in cash form)—as money supposedly represents greed, selfishness, and the desire to exploit what belongs to someone else. Looking for someone with wealth is seen as the mark of a mercenary character or a Jane Austen–era class snobbishness. Overall, wealth is seen as the wrong reason to marry someone unless you’re eager to be lonely and unhappy in a big fancy house with a big empty heart.
In reality, wealth is a resource that is necessary for survival, raising families, and managing bad luck, and partnering with someone who depletes your resources or has little to offer is likely to undermine many of the goals that a partnership is supposed to a
dvance. There’s a difference between looking for someone rich and looking for someone resourceful, and the latter is the kind of wealth that every good partner should have.
That’s because, once the novelty of romance fades, love thrives on a shared feeling that partnership makes life better than it would otherwise be, so if the partnership falters because one person can’t make or save money and poverty hurts the kids, love is not likely to last. You can’t continue to respect or value someone who isn’t working as hard as you are or isn’t exerting the same self-discipline and self-deprivation to advance and protect your family.
Even if women have advanced since the days of Austen and are now able to support themselves (at seventy-seven cents to a man’s dollar, but still), it remains as true today as ever that you must acquire resources before you can afford a partnership, assuming that the goal of your partnership is a family. If you have no resources and no likelihood of getting them, having children will make you poor, guilty, and helpless. Before you begin a partnership, you need to consider how much wealth you will need and what the partnership is supposed to accomplish. Looking for wealth isn’t about looking for a sugar daddy/mama, it’s about looking for someone who can work with you to provide at least enough sugar to keep a family in the financial sweet spot.
Even more important than knowing the financial resources that someone brings to your partnership is rating the way he or she manages those resources. If someone has resources but spends recklessly and without prioritizing, you’ll have trouble making joint decisions even if the money doesn’t run out. You need a partner who manages money according to values you share.
In addition, watching how someone spends his money tells you more about his values than what he says about them, so you need to know if his money is where his mouth is, or somewhere else. How a person spends will also tell you much about his boundaries, i.e., his ability to care for others while remaining responsible for his own needs. Your prime concern is not how much money she lavishes on you but whether that spending reflects an ability to balance conflicting needs, such as those to save and also be generous, rather than reacting to a single impulse. Find someone who cannot just provide resources, but be prudent and responsible for the family’s sake.
F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship Page 19