I’ve mentioned that my parents had a quasi-arranged marriage, and genetics was absolutely something they took into account. My mom likes to say that she would never have married my dad had she known about a minor physical impediment he passed on to me (think something like colorblindness – it’s not that, but similar in severity, that is to say not severe at all unless you want to do certain types of activities that I’m not interested in in any case). I mean, she’s joking… but she’s not really joking.
They told my sister and me constantly that we should take into account genetic heritage when thinking about choosing mates. It worked, too. One guy I was briefly interested in turned out to have a chronic disease, and I was then no longer interested. And I would have thought a lot harder about marrying my husband had I known about a serious genetic problem he might pass on. My sister also angsted really hard about one of her boyfriends who had depression in the family. (I finally pointed out to her that boyfriend’s uncle having committed suicide did not equate to her future kids having depression, and that her boyfriend seemed just fine, with any weirdness about his emotional makeup directly attributable to his upbringing.) She didn’t end up marrying him for other reasons (they were a terrible match), but it’s interesting how much more we stressed about it than most people in this thread – and most people I’ve met, for that matter.
In particular, I told my mom that it’s a good thing my husband didn’t work under this spouse selection criterion – we actually have a little more in the way of chronic disease and potential genetic mishaps in our family than he does in his.
ETA: And absolutely one of the big reasons I married him was that I thought we’d have neat children together.
We used a donor in large part to avoid my husband’s rather significant genetic disorder. It’s a degenerative bone disease, and there is a 100% that any daughters would have it (dominant X-linked trait).
We paid a great deal of attention to the donor’s test scores and college major. And we chose a donor that would be racially . . .plausible . . .as our son. It’s not a secret, but I didn’t want to have to always explain to people that he wasn’t adopted, not that there is anything wrong with that. Test scores and college majors may have been kind of meaningless, but we had to have some sort of basis to chose.
When we were starting to get serious, I thought it was nice thing that my now husband has blue eyes. Since my mother has blue eyes, it was a 50/50 chance that any child of mine would have them if their father did. And – we were lucky and got two children with beautiful blue eyes! (But I wouldn’t have accepted him *just *for that!)
My ex’s family has a high incidence of cancer. Also, he has asthma, as does my brother, and both he and I are nearsighted and have high IQs. We did not take genes into consideration when we decided to marry and reproduce. Our daughter is beautiful, intelligent, nearsighted and has stress-induced asthma. Not too long ago, I was diagnosed as being in the autism spectrum, and I wonder if I would have even considered marriage and children if I’d been diagnosed when I was a child or teenager. In a way I’m glad I wasn’t, because then my Princess would not exist.
This sort of thing only occurred to me in hindsight, and then only in an offhand, lighthearted way, and only regarding one trait: height. I had dated short women, but ended up marrying a taller one, and at some point I realized this made it much more likely I’d have a tall child (which turned out to be true) – and there are a few modest advantages (both cultural and practical) to being not-short. But it certainly was never a conscious factor in my partnering decisions, so my answer to the OP is “no.” As others have said, if you like to spend time with someone then they probably already “complete” you in some way, so genetic compatibility likely comes with the territory (barring some specific and easily identifiable carried syndrome or whatever).
