Aunt Sharon screams "NO"!

I just read on my niece's blog that she is allowing her husband to talk her into dropping out of college to be "retired" with him. She's planning to ignore her own needs and interests to try to develop a liking for his needs and interests, which apparently include such high-level intellectual pursuits as NASCAR. Oh, I am remembering so many other couples who were in the same situation, and it never ended well.

Ellen, a girl I was friends with in high school and for some years thereafter, married her husband when she was still a senior in high school, a move that cost her the title of valedictorian. (Our school would not let a married person take part in P.E. or serve as valedictorian. She had to fight to be salutatorian.) She and he were together through religious conversions, two children, and his abrupt desire to leave his occupation and training as an accountant to chase after a dream of being a television engineer. I've seldom seen a more mismatched couple. He was smart enough, nice enough, and ordinary enough. She was exceptional. Her IQ was easily 160 if not higher. They had nothing in common except for their common church affiliation, which lasted for a while. Finally, they split. She later married a minister who was more her intellectual equal and who encouraged her to become and do what she wanted to do. She's now a minister (with a Ph.D. in theology). Her kids are grown and happy, and her ex-husband is still a low-paid tv engineer. I don't think he ever remarried.

My sister Sheila, for all her lack of education, was still much brighter than her first husband Wayne. Wayne is a good enough person, but Sheila spent many, many hours being depressed because they had so little in common.

My daddy's mother, Grandma Martha Roberts Cockerham, had planned to be a teacher before her mother died and her daddy remarried. The new wife didn't want "her" money being spent on another woman's child, so she forced her husband to turn Martha out into the street unless she would agree to an arranged married with a local widower who had several children. He was also illiterate. So we have a marriage made in hell between an intelligent woman who wants to be educated and an illiterate hog farmer who just wants a babysitter for his previously existing family. From everything I've been told about her, Grandma was the bitterest, saddest, meanest old woman who ever lived. We know what happens to a dream deferred. It dries up like a raisin in the sun. And so does the soul of the dreamer.

A woman who is much smarter and more ambitious than her husband can "stoop" to his level for only part of her life without losing who she is. Men, for some reason, seem to like having unintelligent wives that they can feel superior to. Women hardly ever seem to accept having a husband with less intelligence. I remember how Ellen used to cry because her first husband never wanted to do anything or go anywhere or watch a foreign film or visit a museum. NASCAR was fine with him, too.

Oh, Tassina, if I could, I'd ship you over to Michigan and enroll you in the college where I teach. You are a swan trying to become a duck.