I succumb too much to the temptation of personal anecdote and elliptical allusion. Your self control is perhaps admirable, but were I to emulate you it would cause a marked change in blog content. Our Dr. Manhattan subject has taken it on the chin from Prudie and the commentariat. I should confess (ha!) that I am, as slynnro accused the writer of, making excuses for someone who is almost certainly a little low in the EQ department. Constant Readers can speculate as to why. Moving on . . . .
Mental whateverness: The classic Potter Stewart problem of romance. I tend to believe in IQ, although a human supercomputer wouldn't have mental whateverness, even for the old, Galt-seeking Amber of yore. But unless you're willing to sign up for a truckload of work, it seems like you ought to be roughly on par with your partner, give or take a stddev. It's wearing, as many people in your linked conversation observed, to constantly have to be dumbing yourself down or explaining yourself to someone.
Part and parcel of that communication issue, though, is the issue of vocabulary and experience: shared references, shared pasts. It's difficult to break through the barriers of class, for example, and relate to someone whose every experiential connotation clashes with yours. (I assume that's how I end up with so many friends with backgrounds similar to my own, and perhaps why relationships with those whose family life I can only characterize as aspirational fizzle.) Raw brainpower is helpful, but there's a certain amount of wavelength similarity, or at least harmony, necessary to keep things moving. At a certain level it is easiest for like to join with like, which leads to assortative mating, amalgamations of intergenerational wealth, and hemophilia.
Another blogger, after seeing my confusion with the dynamics of male relationships, sent me a link to this site. There's a lot of interesting stuff there, some of it sort of appallingly hilarious and some common sense. I can see this appealling to college dudes who like Swingers. I guess you know someone's the one when you don't wish s/he was smarter, or more whatever. It goes both ways.
Some other links, for the sake of stimulating conversation:
Omar? Is that you?
How do atheists handle the issue of mortality?
Tips For Getting Over the Death of your Dysfunctional Father.
When you're 10 years on you'll look back on the first couple of years and all the stories and problems and strange stand out events, and realize they were about him. All those people you tried to relate to and couldn't, it was about hurting over him, wanting to be with him, wanting to make things better.I wonder how much this explains, six years on.
And on a lighter note: Perhaps the most jawdroppingly awesome thing to be unveiled on the internet.