I've been married for 20 years and have been through big companies, startups, and consulting. IM(NS)HO, the most important thing between spouses is the ability

I've been married for 20 years and have been through big companies, startups, and consulting. IM(NS)HO, the most important thing between spouses is the ability to communicate. She may be supportive, loving, caring, and willing to learn, but the gap between your relative cultural awarenesses is substantial. Too substantial? I do not know, only you do. You know how it is with your closest friends, the ones you've known forever: You say one or two words of movie dialog with just the right intonation and they smile or LOL or frown or cry with you, because they know exactly what you mean. ("Temba, at rest.") Take that and multiply it by a Really Big Number (RBN): That is the lack of commonality in your communications. Your references to biblical exegesis, music theory, FPS or MMO, economic policy, etc., etc., etc., are all lost. You do not have that shorthand communication. You'll make a comment, say, a literary metaphor, and she will be lost. Multiply her loss by RBN when the two of you are out with your friends. If, IF, the two of talk about this, and decide together that the two of you will support each other through thick and thin and work together to overcome this isolation, without ever, ever, EVER, being patronizing or condenscending, if, if, IF, then the two of you can make it work. But it starts with that conversation. If she is sufficiently self-aware, she is aware of this gap. If she is a self-motivated learner, she will overcome it. But the day you mess up and lord your superior cultural knowledge over her is the day you lose her. I don't think that one will be apologizable. But then maybe none of this matters to her. Perhaps her interests lie elsewhere and she is so happy being with you while developing her own interests that this present gap will in time be fill in, covered over, by the new history the two of you share. (As an aside, if she is a self-motivated learner, the two of you might talk very seriously about discreetly acquiring a lot of picture-book or graphic-novel versions of the Bible and classics of Western literature and science. Just a thought. But discreetly, so that others don't belittle her for learning from comic books.) All of this assumes, of course, that she is interested in developing her own interests. If you are motivated, intellectual self-starter you will never be happy with a codependent breeder love-pet. You will want an independently minded motivated self-starter with her own interests. She doesn't have to start a startup, but she does have to start herself. And the two of you have to kickstart your kids done the right path too. That requires at least some shared culture, lest one of you lord over the other.)