this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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After a few years of marriage, it came to light that my wife thought the earth was flat. It wasn't some religious thing or cult thing, she had no affiliations. She just came to that conclusion based on visual cues in the world (like ground looks flat) and believed it without it ever being challenged in it.
It came up when she mentioned that a plane fkying near the sun must be getting hot, and I'm like Whaa? I explained the sun is so far outside the earth that that plane isn't feeling much different than us. She revealed she though the sun was inside the earth (like we lived in a snow globe on a flat planar surface) and the sun just went down behind the mountains at night like half hour away.
I was stunned. We had a 4hour talk about the earth as a planet and the solar system and how gravity works.
She curled up in a fetal position and had an existental crisis for the rest of the day.
Somehow she missed school for the gravity, solar system etc. And I'd destroyed her entire core belief system; that she had developed herself.
This is really fascinating to me. Do you mind my asking, with no intended disrespect, how intelligent your wife is? And did she have any kind of unusually isolated situation for much of her life?
😀 I haven't IQ tested her. As a note I'm what she considers a smart engineery computer guy, but she can beat me at almost every game of Scrabble (like 400 vs 250). She can beat me at Tetris every time. She has played this 1010! android game for 3 years straight and not died once. Which is incredible to me. So she has reasoning skills and planning, and some abstract shape solving ability that is very tuned.
But she has zero science background, grew up Catholic, where god did everything, so she never thought critically about the humans on a planet situation.
But she doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to things outside of her realm. So maybe it is an attention issue not an intelligence issue. i.e. she saw this red car go by and said thats nice and a bit different looking. I said yeah it's our neighbours down the street She said I've never noticed it, how do you know its the same car? So I said: it's had the front emblem taken off and re painted. Suspension is lowered, there is a performance parts logo on driver rear quarter window, it has smooth rims without a lot of cutouts, and a black subtle wing added on the tail. When she asked how I knew all that I said because we see it everyday on our evening walk together. For her she's walked by it 100s of times without remembering it ever being parked on our street.
Ha! I am no different than she wrt things like my neighbors cars!
It frequently amazes me what people don't absorb or remember, like whole sentences of a 4 sentence email or text message. I'm not under any illusion that I am exempt from this, but what we see and others miss is of course more apparent to us.
Well now that I'm aging, I do have moments of blanking out. I used to be always in "recording" mode of my daily activities, which is probably why I need quiet down time. But lately I'll take out the recycling, to empty into our condo bins, and when I get back my wife says "where's the tote?". And I'm like, " Ah, probably down by the condo bin where I left it". Lol