I skimmed the Neglected Areas of Practice article, and this piece stuck out:
"Peer issues continue into adolescence and adulthood, and are relevant to socializing, relations with coworkers, dating, marriage, and family. A relevant and helpful concept for bright adults is that of an intellectual “zone of tolerance.” That is, in order to have a long-lasting and meaningful relationship with another person (whether in friendship or a romantic relationship), that person should be within about plus or minus 20 IQ points of one’s ability level (Jensen, 2004, personal communication). Outside of that zone, there will be significant differences in thinking speed and depth or span of interests, which likely will lead to impatience, dissatisfaction, frustration, and tension on the part of each participant. Others have found that people who marry each other or become friends are usually within about 12 IQ points of each other (Ruf, 2012). When one is highly or profoundly gifted, the difficulty of finding someone similar increases."
As crude and distasteful as it is to think of relationships in these terms, I think there is something to this. Even without having the scores, my spouse and I both readily recognize that we're closer to a 20+ gap than 12 and that that gap is a real barrier to understanding and empathy. Just the fact that "giftedness" literature seems to explain all the mysteries of the universe to me and falls flat with my spouse feels like both a symptom and cause of the problem.
