Well said, you need to have your first fight and how you react. There's been only one affair in my life that we broke up for over 6 months, saw other people and we returned back together... she became my wife for 19 years and mother of my kids but she wasn't the one life partner. I am still playing with fire now with not my life partner but my dance partner of my life... because she dances that good. But I know another woman can come into my life making dancing irrelevant. Because love and life is like that and you have to be prepared for the twist. I won't be caught by surprise.

Well, thanks for that. I've suspected all along (after 3 divorces and an abruptly terminated long-term relationship) that I was just too damned stubbornly independent to do as l was expected. That clears things up a bit.

@omgwowsocool I suspect that mentioning such information would upset many people, since most take gender behaviors for granted, never noticing the obedient husband syndrome. I'm so male that I also have a strong impulse to obey women, and when my daughter visited me here in Songkhla, Thailand, a year ago, I spent all my time happily following her around buying her things and letting her order me around.

I'm in Mensa. Very few people I have met there are remotely androgynous, nor am I. I work in tech where there are a lot of smart people, many gay people but not androgynous. I also have an MA in Counseling and did a year long internship in community mental health. I'd like to see where you got these ideas as they seem questionable at best.

@shockwaverider Numerous studies, articles, and books. The very fact that you're hostility questioning me indicates high female influence since most cis men don't really care. Most people of mixed gender don't realize they are. One way to check for fetal hormone influence is to check your finger lengths; longer ring fingers than index fingers indicate high levels of prenatal male hormone, while longer index fingers indicate high female hormone influence. But if it upsets you, that's why I don't want to post this. Most Americans assume that the gender binary is a real thing, but in Asia and other countries that's not so, and people see themselves as being on a gender sliding scale. Thai even use reflexive pronouns to indicate which gender they identify with at that moment.

@birdingnut I never said I thought gender was binary or wasn't fluid. I have met androgynous people and I had a few clients who were transgender and genderfluid, one of whom was quite smart.

I do however think your linking high intelligence to androgyny and successful marriages to the man deferring to his wife in all things are suspect and certainly not true in my experience or anything I've read.

You interpreting my comment as hostile, not providing a single reference for your ideas, and then trying to attack my masculinity? "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

@shockwaverider Hmm..time to drop the subject ,as you just proved my objection to posting on this subject. I thought maybe it would be OK here, without being attacked by the alt-right, but I guess it's too touchy a subject for many. If I gave you the names and links of all the articles and books I read, there's no reason to think you'd believe them either, so just forget I said anything.

@birdingnut I'm a liberal, far away from the alt-right. You did make me laugh - thanks for that.

@birdingnut Wow. This response is really amazing. Thank you! I will need to start a googling frenzy, do some research, and put a lot of thought into things before I will feel qualified to have a competent conversation with you.

I took a silly facebook quiz once and it assessed me as 33%Female 33% Male and 33% Freaky. People were agreeing with that assessment. I see it as a strong female wants to stay at home, cook, clean and have babies. A strong male type likes to pay for stuff. Well, I never wanted a baby. I've seen people in fertility clinics, getting IVF and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to conceive. Um , my response is if it happens to me where is the nearest fire department?

I can see how your previous life experiences motivated you to become an expert in this topic. Thanks, it could be helpful for me too!

Well, the debate from @shockwaverider keeps things interesting. I keep facebook conservatives around who haven't defriended me. They can't hear me laughing at them behind the screen. Without them it would be just me and my liberal friends sitting around saying, "Yup..." Like the rednecks in a King of the Hill episode.

@shockwaverider I went back and inserted a few links after a quick google search, but most of the info I have read repeatedly in science journal feeds and books, as I have hundreds of books in my Kindle library, many of them on gender issues. You haven't heard of these things because they don't fall in your interest range, but my ex is transitioning to nonbinary female and I recently realized I'm a partial trans male, but stay androgynous as long as I take the Thai herb, derris scandens, that stops dyslexia symptoms, sharpens my eyesight and blends my gender fluid sides into one whole. By the way I qualify for Mensa at an IQ of 140 and my son's is 160.

@UrsiMajor Thanks. I've gotten several good laughs out of this too.

@birdingnut I've met lots of people who thought they could get into Mensa based on some free online test. I doesn't work that way.

Your links correlate androgyny to creativity, not intelligence. A quote from your second link:
"In 1980, Weinstein and Bobko found that above an IQ of about 115, IQ was no longer correlated with creativity as measured by a test of the ability to form remote associations and a measure of the ability to generate associative uses. What was related to creativity? Androgyny."

So your link contradicts one of your major postulates.

@shockwaverider I just grabbed the first google link that came up before I went to bed. The last link, about creativity and androgyny being linked is more specific, and there was a book that had charts and studies showing how increasing androgyny statistically increased IQ, but so far I haven't entered the right words in google search to bring it up.

@icolan I wasnt calling him an alt-right, only comparing him to the alt-right, the way they come out of the woodwork to attack any doubt being cast on the gender binary trope. Being attacked by an atheist was unexpected. I thought they were more informed on gender issues. 20% of millennials identify as LGBTQ, according to new GLAAD study [huffingtonpost.com] via @huffpostqueer

@icolan Thanks for that and you're right. It is pretty insulting to be called alt-right but it didn't bother me as it is ridiculous.

Maybe it's just me, but I think the intent of the original question was more like "how did you know" it would be your life partner?

@BlueWave I sensed it from the first time our eyes met. We didn't know each other but after that things just fell into place almost like the universe was conspiring to bring us together. In hindsight, abrupt changes happened in both our lives just before we met. On our first date, 2/15/85 I said, I think I want to spend the rest of my life with you. If you don't want to work with me to bring that about, if you don't want to give it your best shot, lets go our separate ways right now. On our 1st date I said that. I knew. He knew. 30 years and 1 day later he took his last breath, me at his bed side. To me, it always felt like it was meant to be.

@ollieberry I just put mascara on and you’ve got me tearing up! That is so beautiful and so sad. I’m sad he died, happy you had him for a very long time, happy he didn’t walk away when you met. Thanks for elaborating. <hug>