Never, ever, contemplating marrying someone who is not your intellectual equal (or close to it). Sooner or later the divide opens. I am not saying Einstein should not marry (he did marry his cousin eventually) but there will be problems.
I used to think that, but now I’m not sure. I say this b/c we all have a long list of needs and interests and it’s doubtful that any one person can satisfy them all. I think that’s why you need to have a large circle of friends.
E.g. I like to play guitar and listen to music. My last SO wasn’t into that much at all. Rather than fault her for not sharing my interest or dump her for someone who does, I can find friends who enjoy it and fulfill my need in that way. And it works both ways—there were things she might love and I don’t, but I don’t want to clip her wings by saying, “Either we both do it together or it doesn’t happen at all.”
Don’t we put too many unnecessary expectations on the relationship? There should be me time and us time, going out with the girls/guys, all that. Doing everything together 24/7 gets pretty old.
Having said that, there are certain aspects that can’t be ignored. I was highly interested in one woman until she told me she didn’t believe in banks. The idea that you could put your money in a bank, write a check, and mail the check…nope, she’d make the trip to the electric company with cash in hand, get a receipt, etc., and then continue to the gas company. Direct deposit? Automatic withdrawal? CREDIT CARDS?! She insisted on re-inventing the wheel and I couldn’t see myself educating her.
Finally, a sense of humor is probably more important than intelligence. At best life is going to dish some shit that intelligence won’t remedy and if you can’t laugh together, you’re screwed.
I think the bigger issue is don’t marry someone you can’t respect. Smart people tend to respect other smart people. She may be the most beautiful and kind person in the world, but eventually your inner jerk may win out and the fact that she is dumber than dirt will leave you with little respect for her. If you have little respect for people who are overweight, don’t marry someone whose genetic code contains “will balloon up in middle age.” If you have little respect for the rich, that beautiful, intelligent, trust fund baby may not be the girl for you. These sorts of prejudices run deep in most of us - and you might think “I love her, I’ll get over the fact she has a million dollars and her dad is loaded.” And then one day, she discovers you haven’t.
OK, the above is true. But also true: your fantasy romance has nice calves, sweet-smelling hair, makes a mean lasagna, gives a good backrub, and invents hilarious nicknames for television actors.
As featherlou says, don’t go into a marriage expecting that every day will be sweetness and light and perfection.
But don’t go in expecting to have a year long honeymoon followed by thirty years of mundanity and an endless parade of faults and flaws. If that’s your approach, then that’s exactly the kind of life you’ll have. The bad stuff doesn’t go away once you’re married, but neither does the good stuff, and it’s important to remember both of those things.
Not sure I buy this. Without having to go through very many married couples I know I can think of many examples of happily married couples who weren’t on the same intellectual level.
I think there’s a two-level rule about couples - never date anyone further than two levels away from you in any particular aspect because as others have said, it is not likely to last when you’re so far away from each other in those aspects. If you’re the stronger one, you’ll get tired of having a partner who is so much weaker in that area, and if you’re the weaker one, you’ll get insecure about why your partner is with you.
Mixed relationships, where you and your spouse are from different cultural or religious backgrounds, can work.
The thing about them is, though, there are no defaults. If you assume that your spouse will waggle their antennae and magically understand and accept how everything has always been done in your culture or your religion, you’ll be disappointed. Learning and living another culture or religion is not easy (differential equations are a walk in the park by comparison- I know this firsthand), and you’ll have to be patient with your spouse making mistakes, or with yourself if you aren’t picking up a new religion or culture easily and immediately.
Cross-cultural or cross-religious issues don’t go away after the wedding (this is another thing that the movies get wrong, by the way). They keep cropping up at various moments. For example, I converted to Judaism before I married Mr. Neville in 2003. We recently got invited to my new niece’s christening in the Catholic Church, and we’re planning to go. We had a discussion recently about whether it would be awkward for us to not go up for communion (my Protestant parents presumably won’t, either, so we won’t be alone), whether we’re expected to stand and kneel when everybody else does (AIUI, we are expected to stand, but we can sit when they kneel). These issues come up at life-cycle events (weddings, births of children, deaths) as well as at holidays and just at random.
Even if your spouse isn’t religiously observant or into the rituals of his/her culture, or converts to your religion, it’s still likely to be in your interest to learn about those cultural and religious practices. He or she may have other family members who are very much into that sort of thing. I recommend the book How to Be a Perfect Stranger for the religious etiquette of most common religions/denominations in the US and Canada. The basic rule, though, is that, while you shouldn’t do anything that violates your own beliefs, you should find a way to do that that doesn’t involve making a huge fuss and drawing attention to yourself. If you really don’t think you can do that, you’re better off staying home while your spouse goes to these family events. You’re not going to convert anyone to your ways by making a scene at your sister-in-law’s wedding, your niece’s baptism, or your nephew’s bris.
There’s another potential problem lurking here, too. If you marry someone far up or down from you on the socioeconomic scale, even if you love and respect them regardless, you need to realize that some things just aren’t going to be the same as they were for your parents or for you when you were growing up.
If you marry someone who is much poorer than your parents, unless you’re really Bill-Gates-style loaded, you’re going to have to make some adjustments in your expectations when it comes to lifestyle- where you live, vacations, stuff like that- or you can end up in very serious financial difficulties. Financial difficulties, incidentally, are almost never going to make a marriage better, and are extremely likely to make it worse. Money is one of the main issues married couples fight over, and fights over money often turn bitter when the underlying issue is “there isn’t enough”.
If you marry someone much richer than your parents, you might not be as likely to spend yourself into financial ruin (though it does happen- all fortunes are finite). But remember that your spouse is going to have different expectations about how things should be than what you grew up with. You have to deal with this, and you can’t deal with it by saying “we’re not as rich as your parents, so we always have to do things my way and you’ll just have to deal”. (Well, you can, but it’s probably not the best thing to do in terms of your spouse’s long-term happiness- saying “I’m always right and you’re always wrong” is generally not good for that) You’ll have to do the hard work of talking and compromising, maybe even work out a monthly budget that allows your spouse some of the luxuries he or she grew up with.
Lots of good advice in this thread. This topic has been on my mind lately. My brother is getting married this fall, and I’m concerned that he and his bride-to-be are headed for trouble. Somehow, my brother has gotten it into his head that he will have a happy marriage as long as he does everything his fiancée tells him to do. (The “yes dear” approach to marriage.) He’s complained to our parents about financial arrangements, wedding plans, vacation plans, etc., but he’s unwilling to discuss any of these topics with his fiancée.
I’m worried that my brother is going to end up resenting his future wife because he’s too afraid to speak up. Is there anything I can do to help him? I’ll start a separate thread if necessary to avoid hijacking this one.
I think you should probably start a new thread - that’s a whole discussion on its own.
I ran across another one that a couple should do together before getting married - move heavy furniture together.
If you’re unhappy with something in your marriage, the first person you should discuss this with should, in nearly all cases, be your spouse. (The only exception would be something like spousal abuse) Don’t go dragging your parents, their parents, or friends into it unless absolutely necessary.
I suspect that the more we have in common (to begin with), the more likely the relationship is to work.
Different cultures, tough gig. Having been married to someone from another culture, I can tell you that sometimes the habits and beliefs seem crazy, but there’s a method to the madness. Both people need extra latitude in understanding and the process runs slowly at times.
The older we get, the more rigid we become in our ways by and large, but I think we also revert to the familiar, i.e. how we grew up. I wonder if you concur, Anne.
A guy I know (who is a lawyer) says, “Money is often the issue but rarely the problem.” I.e. it stands in as a substitute for what’s really bugging the couple.
Overall, I think my brother said it best (though he may or may not have not coined it): “A marriage can survive without love…but it can’t survive without respect.”