Me: There was a large difference between my ex and myself, with him being slightly below average in some respects. This contrasted with his siblings, who seemed fairly bright in comparison, and I later discovered that his mother had experienced birth complications with him that had deprived him of oxygen for a few minutes. I didn’t really mind.
The value of a person to me does not rest with their intelligence, but with the positive impacts they have on my life. My ex was a caring person and we had a lot of fun together, but I think the difference did start to bother him. I never brought the issue up, as it wasn’t relevant to me, but I have three STEM degrees and was pursuing a fourth and he was a lifelong food service worker with no college education, and while I never intended to make him feel bad in any way, I think sometimes it couldn’t be helped, and he started to become passive-aggressive and resentful towards me.
My line of study occasionally brings me into contact with people significantly more cognitively endowed than me, and I admit, it can be intimidating, and I don’t think I would feel comfortable in a relationship with any of them. So I empathize with how my ex must have felt, but I don’t think it’s anything that could have been helped.
I am about where you are intelligence wise. But I have dated women in the past few years who did not know what mouth to mouth resuscitation was. They did not know what Latin was. They did not know that there were such things as language families. You think it is going to work between me and them? How is a relationship with them going to work anyway?
I met a couple of young women lately who did not know what labor unions were! They were in their early 20’s. How can I date a woman like that? What are we going to talk about?
Someone coming from the intelligence level of the commenter and me is just not going to be happy with someone like that. I don’t want to be explaining the definitions of words all the time. It gets old real fast. These women were perfectly fine human beings, but they need to get with someone whose brain is operating more near their speed.
I know a woman with a 156 IQ. Her husband, a professional musician, is not anywhere near there, though he seems like a fairly intelligent fellow. She was actually thinking of divorcing him to due the tremendous IQ differences. I know her well and her brain is unbelievably fast. I do not think I have ever seen a brain that operates that fast. Whatever you say to her, she gets it instantly. On a few occasions, she did not understand some concept I was discussing, so I briefly explained it to her. She caught on immediately! I am not sure if I have ever seen anyone pick up novel concepts as fast as this woman.
People can scream and yell all they want to trying to shut down discussion of IQ as social failure. I don’t give a damn about stupid social rules.
Intelligence matters in human life! Isn’t it about time we stopped ignoring that and getting upset every time someone mentions it.
It plays a large role in what sort of job you can get. You will need ~120 IQ to become a nurse, ~130 IQ to be a physician or run for President, and ~145 IQ to be a Congressman or university professor. All of those jobs have what could be described as intelligence barriers. Below a certain intelligence level, you simply are not going to make it in that field. You won’t even get through the training program. You will fail the MCAT. You will be rejected for Nursing School. You will not be able to run for President. You will never be a Congressperson. And if you get a PhD, you might have a very hard time getting hired on as a university professor.
In addition, intelligence levels absolutely play a role in human relationships especially with lovers and spouses. It’s a significant factor in human relationships, so we ought to discuss it.
I am not sure I ever meet anyone who is so smart that they intimidate me.
Some professors that I communicate with are extremely smart though. They definitely know more than I do, that’s for sure. But I can often keep up with them. I know one man, James Flynn, an intelligence researcher who discovered the Flynn Effect in IQ scores. I have to say that James Flynn is one of the smartest men I have ever corresponded with. His brain is unbelievably fast. I can keep up with him, but I don’t understand how he reads and gets concepts as fast as he does. He is almost as fast as lightning.
I had to drop one professors Syntax class because he was just going too fast for me. There were a lot of really brainy types in there who were about his speed and they were racing right along with him. My brain was just not operating fast enough for that class! I dropped it after one day and enrolled in another class by another professor. I have an MA in Linguistics, but I seriously despise Syntax. I think I got a C or a B-. I simply cannot seem to grasp the concepts right with all of those charts and diagrams and such.
I read a lot of Linguistics papers because that is my field of study and even work now that I am writing Linguistics books. I am amazed at what many of these people know. I think, “How could any human being have ever retained all that knowledge?” It seems impossible to me. Those people will be ahead of me when I die. I can never catch up to them.
And some of the papers are simply so abstract or are dealing with too many concepts I am not familiar with that I have a hard time following them. I read one recently on Celtic versus Afro-Asiatic syntax. He was suggesting a hypothetical relationship between Indo-European Celtic and Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, etc.). It is a rather old line of research. He kept discussing these syntactic forms that I had never even heard of! Then I would go to look them up and I could find nothing there. His names is Steve Hewitt and he is a Linguistics professor somewhere.
I can usually get through most Linguistics papers, but some are murderously hard. If I concentrate very hard, I can eventually figure them out, but it’s not easy. These papers are actually a bit fun to read because it is such a challenge trying to figure them out, and when you finally get it, you feel a real sense of accomplishment.
