I know the term “Coexist” is primarily associated with religions. I have had a sticker on the back of my vehicles for longer than I can remember to that effect. The world would be a much better place if all religions agreed to just coexist with one another. But, I kinda think the term can be applied to other areas of life. For me, that includes marriage.

Yeah, I was married for thirty-five years before my wife passed last year. Before my marriage, due to my Aspie traits, I was a train wreck when it came to understanding relationships. So, I shouldn’t be giving advice, but I am going to do that anyway. That advice is that long-term relationships such as marriage should be based on partnerships. The two people involved should be on a near level in playing field of life. When talents, interests, and skills are out of balance, unnecessary tension results.

I married a woman who was plainly not on the same level with me in many areas. We simply had few common experiences.

I had been blogging for thirteen years before she died, and she never read a single one of those posts. She simply wasn’t interested in what I had to say. Within a year of our marriage she had quit her job and was thereafter consumed with her simple daily tasks. She considered everything else as just interference to that. It wasn’t very far into our marriage that I coined the letters RCA. That meant no requests or comments about her activities. She simply didn’t want to hear them. I loved my wife, but I have now finally come to accept that we had little in common besides being middle-aged and still unmarried when we met. She was the most stubborn person I have ever met, with probably the exception of me. We were both pretty well set in our ways before we met, and our marriage did little to change much of that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that if you marry someone who doesn’t have your intellectual capacity or share your interests, that you can’t have a happy life. Yes, we seemed to coexist for pretty much the last decade of our marriage, but I am convinced that I would have been much less of a person without my late wife. In some ways, the challenges made life more interesting, and in others life-saving. I’m uncertain if I would still be around without her after I became deaf. She was my anchor during those years. She kept me settled and calmer while facing all the oncoming challenges that deafness brought. For those reasons alone I cherish my years with her.

Getting back to the main topic of this post, marrying someone who is at a similar intellectual level will make for a happier life. It is now as plain as that to me. But, then again what do I know?