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Married men of the motte, I need a sanity check.
To put it bluntly, my partner is lower status and less intelligent than I am. 110 vs 125 IQ points. middle class vs upper middle class.
We've been together for a year and our relationship is otherwise great (unrelated mental hang ups i have posted about here before aside). I can see myself marrying and being content.
Unfortunately, I am a pretty HBD-pilled individual, and the concept of my future children potentially being less intelligent and of phenotypically lower status fills me with dread. (The woman in question has many many positive qualities I DO want my kids to have.)
Is it over? Is that alone enough to say I should break up because that shows how I don't really love her etc? Are doubts like this normal for a young guy who's maybe getting commitment anxiety?
I come from a family of fairly accomplished people. Upper middle class academics and some geniuses. Her family generationally is lower/middle middle class.
My children would inherit this.
Now I should add that her family is of perfectly average to above average intelligence. The biggest difference is that they have very little intellectual curiosity. Abysmal levels of general knowledge, archetypical shape rotators.
(They do have their own opinions and are independent thinkers but they are deeply "practical people")
I thought this wouldn't bother me, and it doesn't, in the relationship. But I dread my kids being like that.
Narcissism? Does my girlfriend secretly disgust me? Am I giving this too much thought? I really want some outside opinion on this, preferably by people with children. This is obviously something I can only talk about on this forum.
Since you asked, to give the other side, I think you should split up, so long as you're young-ish and would be dedicated to finding a new wife afterwards. You're going to spend two decades of your life raising the children, each individual moment working, consciously or not, to help your children be successful in life. And the highest impact thing you can do to ensure the kids have successful, interesting good lives is to ensure they have good genes. The idea marriage is about entirely personal romantic feelings detached from other material considerations is a modern one, an idea of irrational, overpowering romantic love isn't new but it coexisted more with real interests in the ancestry and health of the children. I wouldn't worry about the lower-class part - a lot of of smart people come from middle-class families - but the intelligence part is more important.
Also, HBD generally refers to the association of race and IQ, which is very contested. The heritability of individual intelligence is less contested, it is the mainstream scientific consensus, and it's just extremely obvious.
You probably do love her? Romantic love isn't an overpowering metaphysical principle that overrides other facts or beliefs. You can genuinely love someone and at the same time rationally (or mistakenly) think being with them is a mistake.
To some of the points from other commenters:
I understand why this feels true, but does it actually mean anything? Having children is - literally, words mean things - a eugenics program, in that your instincts for sexual attraction, both physical and social, are very clearly selecting for some sense of good genes to pass onto your children. Being successful and intelligent are attractive! And surely their intelligence and general mental qualities are more important than how tall they are or what their waist/hip ratio is! Most of the people replying to you, like most people in general (due to assortative mating), will likely marry someone of their social/economic class, as that's just what we instinctively do. (Assortative mating for class is stronger than for IQ, which on an individual level is imo a mistake). The experience of your children in life in the future surely does matter. Imagine if your five year old fell off of a bike without a helmet and lost 10 IQ points. I feel like that'd be tragic! Part of the "meaningfulness" of being a parent is protecting the kid from things like that! And yet... (I'd enthusiastically bite the bullet on every unintuitive consequence of this thought experiment)
Interactions between people aren't symmetric when the interactions have other effects! It's good when a company fires a bad worker, even when the person firing them wouldn't want to be fired themselves. It's a good thing that the smartest archaic human 500k years ago tried to pick a smart partner and didn't settle for a dumber one because it'd be mean to do that! It's how we got here.
This is just, like, false? Whether it's high school math, basic facts about how the world, government, economy, etc function, or the ability to accomplish one's goals, intelligence is enormously important. To the point that if your wife was 85 IQ (or even 100), you wouldn't have gotten together in the first place because the contrast would be too apparent.
I strongly suspect the last commenter's wife is not an average person, they're an intelligent practical-minded person, and a genuinely randomly-selected person would produce different intuitions. It's berkson's paradox https://brilliant-staff-media.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tiffany-wang/1Mvt8RPtlU.png for "academic" vs practical intelligence.
You make some good points, but are you a parent though? Im fully aware of the exact statistical difference this partnership will have on my offspring. I only care how succesful and capable my future children are, insofar that future me will care.
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