Smarter Than Me

My wife is smarter than I am now.  It pains me to admit that.

A comparison:

It was a long journey for me to go from liberal - which I considered part of my identity - to something in the conservative/libertarian range.  The issues fell one by one, perhaps beginning (pre 1980) with discovering that pro-life people were actually not monsters and even much nicer, and ending (post 1990) with gun control, where the 2A people just had the better arguments at every turn, darn it. Slowly, slowly, the treasured general liberalism slipped from my grasp.

To the title topic. Over a longer course, and reaching the tipping point this week, I have to admit that my wife is smarter than I am. I say that lightly, even playfully, yet I am talking about a real conclusion. Smarter is a word that always has a context, so that each of us might be smarter in this domain or that, but as a general statement it has to be one's whole life at present. In the 1980's it was she who reluctantly admitted "You really are smarter than me," and while I attempted to be a gracious winner and always find points of praise I have clutched this concession to my bosom ever since. She has always had domains where she exceeded me, but mine were (ahem) more important. 

Our vocabularies are similar, hers slightly better. She has distanced me ever-further in inspired word-puzzling.  Wordle came into our lives and she gets it in two much more often than I do. Her spatial intelligence is better (engineer's daughter) despite my improvement over the years. I am much better arithmetically - but here's the key to what I'm talking about: we don't use that so much these days. The hundreds of memorised numbers I made my living with no longer need to be called up. We rarely have to compute something. To try to hide my ego behind the claim the well I could if I needed too is rather hollow. Smarter includes context. 

She has always been better at natural history, the birds, wildflowers, fungi, and animals of the world. Well, biology major and school librarian I consoled myself. Yet when I took specialties of my own such as constellations and trees, and put in effort over years, when she took those up she passed me in a month. She intuits what identifying information is important. I never had as much use for it as she did, but now I have greater need of it. Context.

I have been good with names and faces.  She is spectacular. My remote memory is unusually good - but few other than myself use that. Despite kicking herself frequently for something she has forgotten, her recent memory is better than mine.  I ruefully say that Google replaced me and my network of like-minded friends who relied on each other's specialties to always be able to quickly know things.  It used to be a humblebrag, that I could converse off the top of my head about Negro League baseball, colonial America, CS Lewis and the Inklings, Indo-Europeans and a hundred other subjects. There was a day when that was useful. But, as Aragorn said "That day is not today." Humorously, I can sing all the verses of the Superchicken theme, which hardly anyone can do, but everyone can pull it up on their device when I get stuck on a section.

I still talk better than her, and though many will deny it, listen better.  Although maybe it's just me she doesn't hear. 

This week was brutal.  The PC started acting very badly, and we decided to switch to an iMac. Migrating the data was not working, likely because the hardware was too damaged.  I had some things to try.  She had more things. She also understood the manuals, online videos, and Apple support more quickly than I did. She is adjusting to the Mac differences much more quickly than I am.