#3

While this dealbreaker blog is about idiots, I am specific to idiot in only the extreme sense. I definitely don’t feel the need for an intellectual high brow elite spouse, but there are some very basic requirements that I need to work with someone on a reasonable level.

When two people are around each other long enough, they will often come to different outcomes given the same set of information. This variance in conclusion or opinion comes from a matter of taste, or sometimes interpretation. Often there are numerous components from earlier tendancies or experiences which become a factor, but among reasonable people, these components can be shared and understood. When the factors which come in to play can not be reasoned, or explained, there are major problems.

I personally don’t need my counterpart to be brilliant, scholarly, or well informed. If I want a chess partner, I can just program one. However, when the opinions diverge I need to at least understand and give credit to the building blocks which formed their opinion. Without a sane flow of reasoning, what am I to do? I don’t know how to compromise with idiocy, why should I live that way?

Being forceful and dismissing someone’s opinion is a major form of disrespect so that doesn’t sound ideal either, I don’t want my wife to be ignored, or need her daily decisions made for her.
If my opinion can not be understood in her mind, and/or her opinion can not be understood in my mind, there is an impass. Among sane people it may take a while to understand each other, but there is a trust that there is some legitimate reason somewhere. I plan on being married for like 50 years, and I would be a fool to sign up for a puzzle that has no reasonable solution, just continually bashing my head against the wall for that long trying to make sense of an idiot’s logic.

If my spouse decides to sell her passport for a fiftieth pair of shoes, then smoke will puff out my ears. Maybe she will decide to not buy groceries for a week to save up to attend a pop star concert. If she tries to justify leaving an infant in a car while she runs into the mall to have some coffee and buy a bonnet – I just don’t know how I’d handle such idiocy — so I just wont. I definitely would add ‘complete moments of instability’ to this list, since sometimes people freak out to the point of major malfunction and make everything worse causing major harm like driving off a cliff edge. In life, bad things inevitably happen and our strength and sanity are tested; I don’t want someone responsible for my children to severely fail those tests.

Total lack of reason is a deal broken.