Let’s call it, hypothetically, motorcycling

[oursin]

Eleanor Gordon-Smith: Leading questions: Relationships

I’m towards the latter stages of my career and have also raised a large family over the last 25 years with my wife. I don’t have or find much else of interest outside work and my immediate family, but I’ve been increasingly keen to take up a hobby that I used to have before I got married. For the sake of this question let’s call this hobby, hypothetically, motorcycling.

My wife has no interest in joining in this hobby and also does not want me taking up this hobby, ardently enough to get to a place of saying it’s a choice between marriage and the hobby.

It’s impossible to break up, too complex, and I don’t want to do that for many reasons. But how do I reconcile accepting that to have a harmonious relationship I have to give up hopes on what is, again, my only interest outside work and family?

How do I give up that interest without resentment of a level that would, I am quite certain, very negatively affect the relationship? I can’t see any other hobby to pursue. I’m also not prone to obsessive interests for short periods of time so this interest is not a passing fad. It seems to be a lose-lose situation. Where’s the win-win? I cannot see a happy compromise or middle ground for either of us.

Eleanor says: It’s hard to imagine what this could be, given your wife has such strong feelings about it and you don’t want to name it. Is it illegal? Is it a sex thing? Is it actually motorcycling, or something similarly dangerous, and she’s afraid of becoming a widow? Those are the only scenarios I can imagine that could make her feel so strongly. If it’s any one of those, denuding it of its features to call it a “hobby” might feel to her a bit like calling it a “group activity” when people get piercings and hang from hooks on the ceiling. Sometimes we have to deal in the specifics.

Without those specifics, it’s hard to give you the “win-win”. I will say that when your spouse tells you something is going to affect them so negatively that they’d rather leave the marriage, you have to listen. That’s just a condition of being married. The term “win-win” is in this regard a little misleading: marital compromise is not just a matter of weighing one person’s interests against another’s, like strangers in court. There’s a third thing, the marriage itself, which needs to be weighed. Really what you want is a win-win-win.

One useful way to start might be to look deeply at why this “hobby” has such enduring appeal. Is it a feeling of danger, youthfulness, losing oneself, risk, reinvention? (I guess these apply equally, whether it’s sex or actual motorcycling.) If you can get to the root of why it appeals, you’ll get two useful things. The first is one you won’t want to hear. It’s to try finding something else that scratches the same itch.

It’s easy to get fixated on the value of the thing we can’t have. That way, we get to resent someone even more for standing in its way. We don’t want something else to hold our interest or make us happy, because then it feels less egregious that we were robbed of what we truly wanted. But as the saying goes, don’t cut off your nose to prove a point about your wife. You can still bristle at being told what to do; you can still feel the loss of not having what you really wanted, while also trying to find something that might feel just as good. Try not to keep your life devoid of other interests so it stands as a monument to this one. It might be fun to learn whether something else feels as fun – but the best way to make sure nothing else will come close is to decide in advance that it can’t.

The second thing you’d get from reflecting on why you want this is a more productive conversation with your wife. She might have legitimate objections to the particulars here (if it’s actually motorcycling, the risks; if it’s a sex thing, monogamy). And she might be entitled to hold on to them. But if you can tell her what you want to feel, whether it’s excited or invigorated or like your own person again, it’s a lot harder to just say “nope”.

Whatever you decide to do together, it’s likely going to need to start with naming more than just the hobby itself – it’s going to start with naming exactly what it means.

Comments

[oursin]

The way he puts it suggests that he wants to retrieve his lost youth by doing something physically daring and potentially dangerous - if not actually motorcycling, maybe hang-gliding, strenuous trail-hiking, marathon training - which might pose considerable risk to someone getting back into them after years of relative idleness.

I'm also wondering whether it's something rather less with the macho-middlelife-crisis vibes and he wants to go back to the good old days of D&D campaigns or whatevs that he played in college.

But I agree that exactly what it is and why wife objects need to be a bit more explicit, this is just too vague.

[castiron]

I'm having trouble getting back into physically demanding activities that I did with no effort before the pandemic, so yeah, if it's something like extreme sports then I can see the side-eye -- but not the "our marriage ends if you do this".

Yeah, we really need to know what the activity is or at least why his wife objects.

[oursin]

With the extreme sports, I'm envisaging him doing himself a mischief if not giving himself a heart-attack, and expecting dedicated nursing and wifely sympathy. (Which she foresees and he doesn't, not realising that he is no longer that athletic young god...)

[castiron]

Yep. The threat of divorce probably wouldn't be coming from "I'm worried that you'll be killed, so I want to distance myself emotionally now so it hurts less if it happens"; it'd be from "I just got done raising a large family of kids, and I really don't want to be your caregiver if you take up this activity and end up brain-injured."

[movingfinger]

The letter is very coy in a slippery-slope way that is familiar from the far right ("you say this is okay, so why not this other thing that's worse?"), so my guess is he's into Nazis.

[topaz_eyes]

I suspect it might be something sex-related; not only did the wife refuse outright when LW asked her to join him in the hobby, she issued the ultimatum. It absolutely does raise the question about what exactly the hobby means to him and to their marriage. They do need to talk about it in depth, possibly with a marriage therapist; there's a lot of missing info about the current condition of their marriage and how strong it really is.

[resonant]

Could be something sex-related. Acting in porn? I would find that a weird and difficult hobby for a spouse, but I won't say upfront that I'd rather divorce than live with it.

There are a lot of things the spouse could do that I wouldn't like -- poaching in Africa, flipping houses, adventure tourism in environmentally sensitive environments -- but I don't know that those would qualify as insta-divorce.

When I try to think of "hobbies" that would make me say to the spouse, No, no way, I'll divorce you before I live with that, the things that come to mind are:

- Some form of nonmonogamy that I couldn't deal with (I might consider a nonmonogamous marriage but I would have problems with him taking a second partner, living in a second place, raising a second family, and financing a second set of house / college / weddings / retirement)

- Something I am profoundly morally opposed to, like right-wing political organizing or filming child porn.

- Something that was going to impinge on my space. Filming porn ... in my bedroom! Practicing bagpipes ... in my bedroom! Smoking tobacco or anything else in places I needed to breathe.

- Something that was going to absorb our shared funds, or that looked likely to leave me responsible for our entire retirement because he would have spent all his money. Collecting antique cars. Investing in cryptocurrency.

Or, yeah, Nazis would do it.

[azurelunatic]

Backyard crewed rocketry!

Illicit drugs with recreational doses that overlap with lethal doses!

[hashiveinu]

It really depends on what the hobby is. It could be "I don't want you to go to BDSM parties" or "I don't want you to spend all our savings on collecting expensive art" or "I don't want you to die in a hang-gliding accident"...

or it could also be "I don't want you to have a life outside of me."

[julian]

It'd be nice if he'd say anything kind about his wife. Because despite talking about the large family and so on, he ... doesn't seem to like her? That might be a thing to notice, in the midst of trying not to resent her for something truly mysterious.

[oursin]

I wonder if he was the sort of guy who, back before they got wed, expected her to share his tastes and interests, dragged her along to the movies, concerts, etc, he wanted to go to, and spent a lot of time 'conversing' = banging on, about same. And she is So Done With All That Now.

'It's impossible to break up' for 'complex' reasons suggests external factors of social repute and appearance rather than emotional commitment, no? (Or religious issues?)

[lethe1]

Maybe not social repute and appearance, but financial reasons? And/or the family? And/or he can't cook/clean/run a household on his own? Definitely not emotional commitment on his part, no.

[jadelennox]

seriously too little info. Does the wife think it's dangerous, immoral, illegal, unhealthy, or just icky? This doesn't read like she's being possessive and controlling in general, although could be that, too. Does she dislike the other people who do the hobby? Does he want to get back into playing pool and she's afraid he'll be sharked or come home smelling of cigarettes? Does she dislike the person he is when he goes back to competitive bocce? Or did she just get traumatized by a feral magic: the gathering game when they were young?

The answers could range from "well, what if I promise to shower at the climbing gym" to "let me introduce you to my new dominoes team, who are all gentle pacifists" to "if you don't want to break up the marriage but you want to go back to performing drag, you and your wife will have to see if you can come to a strangers living in the same house arrangement." Without knowing the source of her conflict, it's impossible to advise.

[resonant]

I felt like he was doing that on purpose, trying to win support for a generalization without giving the tools to judge whether his generalization was an accurate summary of what was going on or not. (Maybe it is right-wing political organizing.)

Also, who can genuinely only think of one hobby that they have any interest in? If his evil wife won't let him raise sharks in the tub, he'll just have to sit in the recliner and stare at the wall?

[feldman]

Meditation and time-out are like, two more hobbies right there.

[needles]

If it wasn't for the fact that it was around 25 years ago I'd have bet dollars to donuts on it being cryptocurrency, lol.

I think LW and their wife should talk it out but I also think the fixation on this being the only hobby they can ever have is something to explore/unpack a bit that isn't really touched on in the advice. I understand hyperfixations are a thing, but to me there's often a way to "feed it" without engaging in the thing directly. If it's a sex thing, could they pursue writing or reading erotica about whatever it is? If it is motorcycling, could they build models or miniatures of motorcycles instead? There might be something hobby adjacent they could do, it doesn't have to be 100% balls to the wall "we fuck in the chicken costume or get a divorce".

[shanaqui]

My dad's hobby before my parents got married was picking up cars for cheap, restoring them, selling them, and then using the proceeds to buy more cars for cheap, some of which he would then rewire, saw in half, stick two different cars together, and flip the gearing round so he could drive as fast backwards as you can normally do forwards. (This is the vague impression I have from his stories of how to describe it, not how he would describe it, rather than a technically accurate representation.)

I can well imagine my mother saying "no" to him doing this again, not least because it was at times dangerous, and at times questionably legal. Cash flow was definitely... interesting.

Another of his hobbies was motorcycle racing. My mother has absolutely put her foot down about that since the time he had an accident, separated his clavicle and ribs from his sternum, and then got back on and continued racing for the rest of the day.

So these are the sorts of things I'm mentally filling in when this guy says "motorcycling", rather than "weird sex" or something like that. In which case, I can find a little more sympathy here. My dad gave up a lot of his hobbies when I was born, so he could offer a stable life and raise me well. He never said he was giving them up forever. As a result, one question for me is: did the wife know about this hobby when she met the LW? Did the hobby used to be okay, and suddenly now it isn't? Why?

[oursin]

Did this also involve the area around the house looking like a junkyard while all this reconstruction work was in progress? Because if so, I'm sure that would factor in.

[shanaqui]

In fact, my father is the homemaker who does 100% of the chores and takes care of the house, and would not abide a mess!

[azurelunatic]

That really, really, really needs the details.

[firecat]

The comments on the original post are hilarious. “What hobby is it?” is like a Rorschach test. (My mind went to crossdressing.)

[ashbet]

I regret that this is a “missing missing reasons” letter, because my responses are different if the wife’s objections are:

> He’s going to kill himself doing this.

> This is an enormous money/time-suck.

> Legitimate moral/ethical objections.

> Personal distaste.

> Petty reasons about change/inconvenience.

> Controlling/he’s not allowed to have a life outside of her.

> Participation would irreparably change their marriage.

> Other people/animals would be harmed.

> Etc.

The nature of the “hobby” really does matter, in this case.

I’m naturally sympathetic to the idea of “I gave up something I loved in favor of adult responsibilities and raising a family, and now I want to enrich my retirement/empty-nest years by taking it up again” — but the degree of coyness in this letter is setting off alarm bells.

[cimorene]

Yeah, exactly. He has to give some idea of what it is at least to get any hope of real advice. It's just too different.

[conuly]

Whatever this hobby is, it's obviously pretty sketchy if he can't even name it in the letter.

[oursin]

Actually I am beginning to wonder if it is that he wants to build a monster model railway system throughout the house, now the kiddies are gone, but that would sound sad and anoraky, unlike motorcycles.

Or making model aeroplanes, but expecting his wife to dust them...

[conuly]

I'd rather see a monster railway system through the house than another boring (and loud) midlife crisis motorcycle.

[lilysea]

Maybe he wants to keep snakes or spiders in glass terrariums, and the wife is phobic and/or doesn't want venomous animals in her house (fair).

[lilysea]

I'm trying to think what hobbies someone could do that would make me leave them instantly without even trying to negotiate, and I thought of:

trophy hunting endangered animals eg lions, sawfish;

intravenous drug use;

gambling addiction/poker machines;

smoking cigarettes (smell is a migraine trigger for me)

getting involved with outlaw motorcycle gangs and doing crimes that scare/frighten/hurt people...

that's all I could think of.

[purlewe]

the only thing I can think of (bc this LW is not very... savvy) is he was once a small plane pilot and even perhaps part of the EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) and it is either cost and or she is terrified of flying. And even the thought of him flying sets off her terror. small aircraft folks are... a bit oddball and risky and she probably know this. plus $$$$$$$ ooh boy. I used to date a pilot (he flies for commercial aircraft now) and we used to go up to Oshkosh to see the EAA show every year. the noise, the amount of overwhelm people wise, the $$$ and the risks people took. I can see it.

lol what if it is something like playing in an orchestra or being in a choir and the wife is immuno compromised? that would be another route. And that could be a deal breaker for sure. But like I said.. he doesn't seem like a subtle person. And I bet it is something like motorcycles only.. it's airplanes.