Modern moral scolds are obsessed with even small age gaps (even when both people are full-ass adults), but an area that’s far more important than this is verbal intelligence. I know I’ve written about cognitive inequality before — which does matter far more in any relationship than any age gap — but verbal intelligence matters a whole hell of a lot as a subset of that.

My verbal intelligence is off-the-charts high. I know this and know I could easily out-debate or just pummel any normal person in an argument. I try to avoid using this for evil but have accidentally done so in the past. (An old girlfriend told me, “There’s no way I can argue with you. You just know too much and are too fast.”*) I don’t use this to bully anyone and try to deliberately pause and listen and just shut up. But the point is that I could easily dominate all but about maybe 0.00001% of the population in any verbal or written contest if I put even a moment’s thought into it.

Why don’t the age gap obsessives care about this? Those like me could (if we wished) hold huge power over anyone of any age with a capability like that.

The easy and mostly-correct answer is age is more obvious and quantifiable than verbal intelligence so it’s easy to obsess over, while less-quantifiable but more-relevant factors are ignored.

*I did give her space to argue after that. It was a fair statement.