Meaning the extent to which you pay attention to hereditable traits that will be passed on to your future children (whether positive or negative) as opposed to attraction and compatibility and other factors that apply to yourself.
One example would be a genetic hereditable gene that doesn’t necessarily impact the potential spouse themselves but may run in their family.
Or another example would be something that is not a concern to you personally, but which tends to be a help or a hindrance in society. For example, you may be personally indifferent as to whether your spouse is athletically gifted, but for social reasons it’s generally helpful for kids growing up to be talented at sports. Or you may be a attracted to a shy person or someone with learning disabilities, and in the case of this person, you can pretty much see much of what they’ve managed to accomplish in life despite these potential obstacles, but if children inherit these traits it will be something to overcome.
It’s obvious that you can’t guarantee what traits your children will inherit by marrying a given person, but nonetheless you can tilt the odds, and I’m curious as to what extent people think of these factors. It doesn’t tend to get mentioned often. (I believe in societies with arranged marriages these may way more heavily.)
That would impact whether I chose to have kids with that person, not whether I chose to marry them. It’s a big factor on why I didn’t want to have kids back when it would have been biologically logical: I was terrified of passing down the crazy from my mother’s side.
When I was getting together with/falling in love with/deciding to marry my husband, I didn’t consciously take into account what he might pass on to our potential children at all. Not the tiniest bit.
It’s possible that I did on an unconscious level, though. I’ve read about studies showing that women tend to be attracted to partners who are genetically very different from them, which is likely to lead to healthier kids.
If he’d had any heritable traits that I really didn’t want to take the risk of passing on to our kids, I’d still be with him. We just wouldn’t have had kids.
Choosing not to have kids when there is a chance that they could inherit an extreme disability makes sense. Choosing not to have kids because they won’t be Michael Jordan doesn’t make sense. Choosing not to have kids because they may end up with athsma or nearsightedness doesn’t make much sense but given the world’s trend to overpopulation I’m not going to fight you on it.
Has no impact on whether you should marry somebody. Marrying somebody doesn’t mean that you’re going to or should have kids.
I was never going to have kids because I didn’t want them, so it was never a consideration in my marriage.
I post on another board that is mostly women, and a question that comes up periodically is, “I just found out that my boyfriend has diagnosed bipolar disorder. What do I do?” and the most common reply is “RUN!” and then people tell their own stories about what it’s like to live with (or, God forbid, have children with) someone who has this. ADD/ADHD is not far behind in that department.
It makes me kind of sad that they don’t consider adopting in that scenario. I couldn’t imagine passing up someone I love for someone who isn’t even born yet, personally. And it’s not like bipolar isn’t a manageable disorder with some help.
Someone who refuses treatment knowing it would have negative consequences doesn’t sound…well, too good a partner in the first place. But like all disorders, some have it mildly and some have it severely, so no I don’t think bipolar disorder is an absolute nix on being around kids or something. I’d only consider it a nix in the case that the person was so out of control I wouldn’t want to marry them in the first place, which precludes any kid questions anyway.
If these women couldn’t tell their boyfriends had bipolar disorder for a long time, it stands to reason that the boyfriends were likely currently getting treatment and that it was working.
Since having children was one of the reasons I wanted to get married, of course I considered how good a parent my potential spouse would be. That included both phenotype (their characteristics) and genotype (their hereditary traits).
I probably think about this more than the average person, but at the end of the day, if I’m considering spending my life with a person, I’m mostly worried about them being a good partner who I enjoy spending my life with. The ability to be a good parent often comes along with being a good partner. But children, if they happen, are a bit of a crapshoot with their genetics and personality, even if both of you are technically perfect.
And I am so far from perfect myself, I don’t look for that in a partner. I was lucky enough to be born with a lot of advantages, innate and situational, but I have used almost none of them to achieve conventional success.
My boyfriend and I both have long-term depression, and plenty of crazy and suicide in both of our families. This wouldn’t keep me from having a child with him… but it is sad to think about.
In the Orthodox Jewish community, high-school boys and girls are encouraged to get genetically screened by an organization called Dor Yeshorim for diseases such as Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Gaucher’s before they ever start dating, and for matchmakers (professional or otherwise) to check into the results before suggesting that a boy and girl meet one another. They don’t reveal an individual’s carrier status, only telling the requester if both boy and girl are carriers of one of these diseases.
^ And that screening has drastically reduced the incidence of genetic diseases in the Orthodox Jewish community.
No, I didn’t consider my husband’s traits when I married him. I wanted to marry him first, and have a kid second. Happily there is no history of genetic disease in either family. Also, we tend to share “weaknesses”: sub-par eyesight, lack of athleticism, and family history of living well into one’s 90s despite high blood pressure and heart disease.
I did briefly date a guy with Russel-Silver syndrome. Had that gone further, I might have had some serious thoughts about whether I really wanted to partner with him, given that I also really wanted a kid.
My husband and I actually had ourselves screened for a number of common genetic diseases by http://www.23andme.com because we thought it would be good to know that BEFORE we start trying to conceive rather than after.
When we were dating, yeah, I did consider that it would be a nice bonus that our children would likely be intelligent since my partner is quite intelligent - but I tend to prefer the company of smart folks anyway, so it’s not like I sought that out just because I wanted that for my kids.
I also don’t think I would give up on an otherwise good relationship because they carried a bad trait - especially if it was just a “nice to have” thing rather than a severe disorder that was going to have a huge quality of life impact. For example, something like colorblindness - it’s not great to have, but it’s not so horrible that I would break up with someone to avoid introducing it into my family.
With many other traits, environment is a big factor and genes aren’t the whole story.
Worst case scenario, you can adopt a kid (or use a sperm/egg donor, though there are no guarantees even then that your kid won’t harbor an unexpected mutation).
That being said, I do understand why people would be wary of marrying someone with bipolar disorder - not so much because of the genetic risk of passing on the disorder, but because if bipolar people go off their medication they can do a lot of unpredictable things that could really damage a marriage. For example, if my husband was bipolar and would run up a huge credit card debt or would sleep around every time he’s in a manic phase, I would find that pretty hard to live with. Manic people are not logical people.
How informative did you find the report from 23andme? My girlfriend just sent them a sample because she was concerned about her family’s history of alzheimer’s, and I was debating doing likewise.
The number one factor I looked at in a spouse was if she was attracted to me. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if there is any genetic benefit to that.
When my wife and I got together, she had been told by her doctors that she probably could never have more children. I went into it knowing that there was a real chance that I’d never have children, which made me sad, but, well, she was worth it. I didn’t think that was a reason not to be with the person I loved. As it happens, we now have two beautiful little girls. Of course, one of them is autistic, so I don’t really know what moral you should draw from my story.
I married a short man who started going in bald in his early twenties and wore glasses because he can’t see farther than 14" without them. His mother is also a manic depressive (medicated currently) with MS. So, no, I didn’t consider genes when choosing my partner.
Seeing as how I’m also short with a genetic tendency to gain weight, no musical skills (important to him), and a very strong ADD and depression streak in my family, I don’t think he considered genes very important either.
But we did get some lovely, very intelligent, very musical children out of the deal and we still like each other an awful lot 20 years later, so I think we did alright. (although two wear glasses and one has ADD. We’re ok with that though.)
Thanks to the enthusiasm for involuntary sterilization of “defectives” in the 20th Century the question of kids for our marriage was rendered moot… with the irony being by my spouse’s birth defect is not genetic in origin.
So… as I had been informed by him prior to marriage that bio-kids were not possible (at least not his) consideration of his genes didn’t enter into my decision to say yes to his proposal.
Or they were undiagnosed, and/or it was manageable without direct treatment. One of my brothers may or may not be diagnosable bipolar; he’s not diagnosed but he is a “highest mountain, lowest valley” kind of person (dude wrote a poem about suicide at age 7 - that’s nowhere near normal). He’s also the sibling who’s reproduced.
It is a commonplace observation among couples exploring sperm or egg donation that they put a ton more effort into examining their donor’s genetics and health history than they ever did their spouse’s.
