Really, I can’t believe this is the main issue either. If I’m looking for qualities in a partner. I’d look for someone who’s kind, easy-going, friendly, fun to be around, open-minded, driven, responsible, confident, etc… Basically personality characteristics that can more or less be controlled. Pure intelligence really wouldn’t factor that high. Deep down, we are all very ignorant of the reality that surrounds us.
You mention that you have two little kids. Who do you think is taking care of them while you’re in college? Try staying home sometime with nobody but the kids to converse with, and see how well you converse with adults at the end of the day. It’s not easy to make that transition.
And by the way, I’ve known some electrical engineers who were as dumb as a log.
Actually, he never said they got married in high school - he may have taken a decade off from his education for all we know.
However, it is clear that they did in fact marry waaay to early. He clearly does not yet have the maturity to be married.
The thing is, you have to let other people discover that you’re intelligent. When you insist on telling us is when we think you’re a dick. I don’t mean that unkindly.
You’re a lot like my Dad-he was a mechanical engineer. He moved up through Boeing very quickly. My Mom stayed home and took care of me. I don’t remember, but she’s told me about how she used to feel inferior. My Dad wasn’t a jerk, but he had no idea how to lift up my Mom instead of beating her down. No clue. When I was old enough to be in school all day, she went to community college and studied to be an office manager. She was damn good, but my Dad’s (and her parent’s) attitudes toward her permanently damaged her self-esteem. She never thought she could get a four-year degree. I KNOW she could have, she’s SMART. If something’s the least bit difficult, she gives up and says she can’t do it. It’s so sad.
Please don’t do this to your wife, your children’s mother. She knows you think she’s a moron and your children will learn their behavior from you as well. When I was a teen I knew exactly how to manipulate my Mom, playing on her lack of self-esteem, and I’ve never forgiven myself. I loved my Dad, but I have a lot of resentment towards him for doing this to my Mom and for allowing me to learn it.
What interests your wife? Could she take a small, even very trivial class just to give her confidence? What does she do well? Is she an awesome Mom? Have you told her that?
You can make a huge difference in both your lives if you encourage and support her. You guys are a team.
Good luck.
The latest theories on intelligence say there are about eight kinds of intelligence. (wiki article). It helps to realise that these are not correlated.
Another useful distinction is in the 16 different motivations people may have in life.Intellectual curiosity is just one of those 16. The professor, Reiss, has interesting things to say about how these drives match or don’t mach in relationships.
The OP may come back, I don’t know; it looks like he may have fled in despair. I’m not saying some of the criticism posted here was unwarranted, but calling him a dick an an asshole is insulting and I’d like for it to stop.
If we could keep posts in a more constructive vein, we might have a chance to actually help the guy.
THANK YOU!
It took 33 posts to get to this! Data, data, data. I can’t make bricks without straw!
To the OP: I’m an electrical engineer with 25 years of experience in hardware and software design. I don’t know you and I can only judge you based on what little you’ve written here. My first impression though is that you have a bit of an ego about your intelligence and education. You are a senior in college. You are more educated than all of the juniors, etc. below you, so that makes you feel a bit superior to them. Assuming that you will be graduating at the end of this semester, in a few months you about to enter the real world. There, you will be working with people like me who will basically be of the opinion that you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, because compared to us, you don’t. You seem to be making judgements about people’s worth based on their education and experience, and this could cause you some serious problems with your self-esteem once you graduate and you are at the bottom of the pile in these areas.
I personally judge people on intelligence, education, and experience when I deal with them in a professional setting. I have to. It’s part of my job. For my friends and people in my personal life, though, intelligence and education doesn’t mean squat. Who they are as a person, i.e. their honesty and integrity, is much more important than whether they took calculus in college or if they can grasp the significance of Nyquist’s theorem.
I also married someone who is “stupid” compared to me. I wouldn’t really call her stupid, but I have been trying to explain to her exactly what it is I do all day long for over 20 years and she still doesn’t get it. She isn’t smart in technical ways like I am. I don’t think that she is less of a person because of it though, and this is where I think you have a problem. Mrs. Geek and I both value honesty and integrity, and we both have a sense of always wanting to do the right thing and are more motivated by that than money. So what if the kids have to show her how to do things on her computer. Big Deal. I didn’t marry her so that she could do some programming for me. She is also superior to me in some ways. Anyone who has ever met me at a dopefest can tell you that I basically have all of the social skills of your typical garden slug. She’s the social one who can carry on conversations and deal with social settings much more skillfully than I can. I am sure your wife has some superior skills as well, but you seem to be ignoring them and focusing on one small area where you have a superior skill set to hers.
I have been a EE for 25 years and I have been married for 22. Having a wife that understands the implications of integral windup in a feedback control loop is not a requirement for a happy marriage.
Personally, I think you should look inward instead of outward for where the problem lies. Start by considering why you are judging your wife based on one narrow set of traits where you happen to excel and she doesn’t. Also consider what brought you together in the first place.
Good luck.
I think the OP’s problem in this thread is that he is coming off as condescending. You are giving people the sense that you are superior to your wife because you have more intellect. As Tollhouse said, you really need to get over yourself. You have an education and everything while your wife is pregnant taking care of children, a mistake in its own. You shouldn’t have gotten married and impregnate her so prematurely.
This combination of condescension and premature marriage and inpregnation of your wife, then complaining about her, sets a bad impression on most Dopers.
On the second page and no reference to Without Feathers yet?
“She won’t discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn’t know that when I married her.”
Anyone in this thread (hell, anyone) who has not read the Whore of Mensa ought to stop whatever they are doing, get a copy, and read it right away.
I don’t know how a couple could last for the long run if they did not respect each other’s intelligence. IMO the OP and his wife ought to either decide whether she wishes to and can change (school/sharing interests/etc.), whether there is enough other than intelligence that would provide a basis for their relationship (I have a hard time imagining how there could be), or get divorced. Staying with someone you do not respect is doing neither (nor the kids) any favors.
I’m no engineer, but I like to think I can hold my own in the smarts department. 
I wonder if I could make a go of it with a beautiful, rich, sweet nympho who adored me, if she were dumb as a box of rocks?
I had a dream that my husband was cheating on me with a dumb woman. Was mad at him the next day until I realized she would have to be smart.
To the OP, make an attempt to connect with your wife. Find a sitter for the kids and go for a walk. Have a drink. Go for dinner. Have conversations. Find something you both enjoy doing and do it regularly together. The toddler years are tough on a compatible marriage.
If you don’t try to connect regularly, you will drift apart. It sounds like you have already started. Marriages take work. You must choose to grow together.
Its likely that the OP and his wife have run out of things to talk about that are of mutual interest, which is a common problem couples face. Especially ones who get married super young, with one person on one track and the other on another. Although I have no reason to doubt the OP is wrong about her intelligence relative to him, obviously at some point her weak vocabulary wasn’t a barrier to him being attracted to her. Why does it matter to him now?
OP, if you’re still here, have you talked to your wife about your lack of connectedness with her? It’s highly likely she feels the same way about you, except instead of labeling you stupid, she probably thinks you’re deliberately talking over her head or using her as a one-way sounding board that never shows interest in what she does. Maybe all yall need is a vacation so that you rekindle whatever it was that made you think she was adorable in the past.
Maybe the wife really isn’t a sharp tack, and spending time with his collegiate peers has just put that into greater focus for the OP. Perhaps he doesn’t have any close friends with whom it’s an appropriate topic of conversation, and that’s why he’s here.
Or maybe, when the OP says she’s dumb, it means she’s not applying herself-- when she’s not working/child-rearing, she’s relaxing or “partying”, not reading philosophy and taking night classes.
I had this problem with my husband when I first left my job-- I spent a lot of free time on “fun” pursuits and my husband assumed I’d be using my free time to dig into solving world hunger or write the great american novel or something. It didn’t mean I was dumb, it meant that my priorities (enjoy my free time) weren’t my husband’s priorities for me (engage with the world and accomplish something).
I think the OP needs to appreciate that his wife is taking care of him and his kids instead of, for example, being gone 3 weeks/month because she’s so smart she’s doing a speaking tour around Europe. I might get flamed for this, but a family can’t have both partners be power-players or the kids suffer. SOMEONE needs to take care of the home and kids and, absent a nanny/housekeeper/domestic staff, it’s going to be one of you.
To the OP: I rarely have time to read all of the responses to any given thread, but I did with this one tonight. Read engineer_comp_geek’s post carefully because he hit the nail on the head. His advice for you via his own story and life experience is excellent. Sometimes, we need to look a little deeper in order to see the bigger picture.
Right, Very few people understand the challenges of raising small children and keeping a home. When they are little, you are on suicide watch 24-7. You never know what they might find to put inot their mouths next, and just taking a shower presents multiple logistical challenges. (and nearly always reuslts in 30 minutes of cleaning up whatever they got into while you did it.
The OPs wife is facing keeping 23 boring little balls in the air, all the time, every day. The OP is meeting challenging intellectual problems in class a few times each week, and enjoying the feeling of accomplishment it gives him.
And, as I said above, chances are good that she is seriously sleep deprived and has been for more than 3 years. The primary thing that the OP can do to even it out is allow her to make up that sleep defiit, an keep it at bay for several weeks so her mind has a chace to really heal.
Only then do they have a real shot at figuring out how to proceed.
Right. Because you’re probably one of the first of the 9 billion people on the planet to raise a small child and keep a home.
And you no good at English?
Hmm…
You said she was ‘stupid’ when you started dating and you thought it was cute.
Maybe she still thinks you think it’s cute. Could it be an act, something to try to please you? I have known girls to act dumb because guys thing it’s adorable.
I don’t know how to fix that or anything, but just putting it out there.
Good luck, OP. An intelligence gap killed my first marriage, although I wouldn’t say he’s so much stupid as differently intelligent than I am. Good with his hands, can take things apart and fix them, intuitively understands how to make it all go, but very close to functionally illiterate, whereas I am the opposite.
I did at the time think he was stupid, but I realise now he’s not. Unmotivated, a crappy parent and lazy, yes (for reasons I haven’t gone into) but stupid, no. And I did treat him as though he was, and that was a contributing factor to the demise of our marriage. I’m not an angel any more than he is the devil, you know?
So if you want it all to work out, just maybe have a think about how you talk to her and if you’re being at all obvious that you think she’s dumb. And maybe work it into conversation that you no longer things dumb girls are adorable?
Again, good luck to you.
IMO, intelligence is a highly subjective term. Like many on this board, I have a MS and PhD but as Ms. DrumBum has pointed out, there is wide gap between “book smart” and “common sense.” I may be smart in a few areas but there are countless everyday things that baffle me and cause her to shake her head. Fortunately, she is there to guide me through.
It looks as if you guys got married pretty young so you both have some room to mature. Perhaps your wife is not interested in EE. I would imagine that very few of the other students at your school are not interested. Many on this board are not interested in EE. Hell, I am not interested in EE. None of this means we are stupid.
Find something else to talk about.
I asked my husband how he deals with having a dumb wife, but he said he couldn’t explain it to me.
Right, and sometimes I’ll repeat myself. Say the same thing twice sometimes, too.