There is this girl who ticks all my boxes but is from a poor background and a form four leaver. She does menial jobs to make ends meet and is currently working as a maid. I have a master's degree and I am employed.
I am 28, and she is 25. She is family-oriented and a church girl. I'm afraid that I might marry her and encounter problems due to that huge gap in education level. Are my concerns valid?
The difference in education level is not the problem per se. The problem is that it usually leads to another issue, which is the real problem - differences in mental capacity: What you've been exposed to. The size of your ideas and imaginations. How much you've stretched your mind through academic rigour and how deeply you've dived into creative thinking.
A four-year degree is enough to transform you into a different person mentally. That is if you engage with the schooling process. Some people go through school, but they don't let school go through them.
Some people graduate from the outside and get the certificate, but they don't immerse themselves in the learning. They only study the bare minimum to pass exams. The rest of the time, they oversleep, party, laze around, and chase romance. This type doesn't go through any significant transformation, and a fresh form-four leaver can challenge them almost in everything.
But if you went to the university and dived deep into learning and experiencing new ways of seeing the world, you cannot leave the same way you came. Neither can you flow mentally with someone who is four years behind you in mental development. It's just not possible. Education opens the mind. An uneducated mind is a closed mind.
A huge difference in educational levels means a huge difference in reasoning levels. For the record, education does not happen in school only. Someone can educate themselves and close the gap with someone who studied in formal school.
A person who reads and exposes themselves to information will be no different from those who studied for a PhD. even if they only stopped at secondary school. What changes the mind is exposure and information, not the classroom.
In short, you can marry this lady only if these two conditions are met. One, that for the period that you were in school, she was also in some sort of self-sponsored school. She was learning intentionally by herself, and you can see evidence of it in the stack of notebooks and textbooks in her possession.
Remember that on your part, your cabinets are full of them. If you ignore this part, the yawning gap in knowledge will show up later to haunt your relationship.
One guy went to the hospital where the doctor diagnosed him with food poisoning and put him under treatment. But when he went home, he beat his wife up for putting poison in his food. That's how he understood food poisoning.
He had stopped education in primary school while his wife was a diploma holder. Imagine the difficulty she had in having to get the doctor to explain to him that food poisoning didn't necessarily mean that someone had put poison in his food.
We're not saying that every primary school dropout thinks like this. We're saying that this person had two problems: their formal education stopped, and they also stopped educating themselves.
The second condition is that both of you must hunger for continuous self-improvement. Do not rest in your superiority, and think you're ahead of her just because you hold a master's degree.
A person who reads or consumes podcasts and other educational materials for one hour every day will, within ten years at most, be ahead of someone with two degrees and who doesn't keep learning.
I suggest that you try this woman's potential for evolving to your level by simply supporting her next project in self-development.
Does she plan on starting a business or doing some professional courses? Does she have some savings for that project? Support her to launch in that direction and see if she can hack it.
Finally, confirm that the two of you can talk and understand each other deeply. Confirm that your attraction to each other is not just physical where you have a powerful sexual magnetism but little mental compatibility. What's the vision for her life? Did she plan on building a decent life for herself with or without a man? If this part is missing, you'll end up with an eater rather than a builder, and it will exhaust you.
Oppressive jobs can cause someone to seek out marriage as an escape. Be sure that she is marrying you out of preparedness and not just desperation.
Levels of education notwithstanding, you need a person you can reason together and co-dream. She will be your co-pilot in life, which means that she must have a deeper grasp of your journey and your destination just like you.
