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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.
I feel like this is some kind of troll, but just on the off chance -- somebody of your (claimed) IQ should know that IQ (heritability in general, really) does not work like this at all. "Lower-middle classness" even less so.
Proof: I have a quite a bit higher IQ than either of my parents. So did Von Neumann, Einstein, and innumerable other smarties (one assumes).
This is a very bad thought pattern you've gotten yourself into, and that's a you thing. Seek help, touch grass, log off, whatever it takes.
If you can't manage this, my advice to your girlfriend would be very different.
Von Neumann and Einstein are necessarily extreme examples! Say IQ is 50% heritable, then the argument still goes through via expected value, although the magnitude is lower. Regression to the mean is a bitch.
Isn't regression to the mean responsible for the phenomenon in which even if both parents are very smart the children are likely to be more average?
Life is a crapshoot -- it's not clear to me at all what the true expected delta in IQ would be from having a 130 IQ mother vs. 110. I'm very confident that in terms of life outcomes this effect would be utterly swamped by having a loving stable family -- which I'd venture may not be the case here, and not because of anything to do with the proposed mother.
(I think 50% heritability is not supported by The Science either? This is not a rabbit hole I want to go down though)
I'm very confident it isn't, tbh, plenty of successful people come from bad upper-class families. And wouldn't this be 'shared environment', which is measured to be approximately zero?
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