A bit of the offshoot of the retirement post and something that I talked about with someone this weekend.
Also what do you consider doing a shared activity is? (Hope that wording isn’t too clunky)?
In my long marriage, I have changed. I will admit that. Since we’ve been empty nesters, even more.
I’ve taken up golf, H and I enjoy doing that together but he will golf without me and I golf without him.
We both enjoy doing active things but not always together. We will drive to a trail and do our exercising separate. He goes in one direction running or biking. And I’ll go another hiking. We meet up and drive home. I consider this doing things together but my friend does not. To do things together, you both have to do the same thing. I don’t run as fast as H or bike as fast and I will be working really hard and he will be hardly working so we do basically the same thing but separate.
My H also has a hobby which takes up a lot of his time that I don’t particularly share. But I’ll go with him to various meetings he wants to go to. Because I want to do things together and we will go out to dinner. Sometimes when he’s at his meeting, I will go shopping or run an errand.
Here’s where I guess I am asking my real question. My friend feels like I have given up my life to subjugate my life to my husband’s. I say that I feel that I’m happy doing things together, it doesn’t matter what it is. And as the years have gone by, I find that I enjoy being with my partner and sharing experiences.
I really enjoy golfing and being active now, which I didn’t years ago.
We like our together life and our separate lives. We do things together (just the two of us), with mutual friends, and individually with non-mutual friends. I play golf. She is an avid reader, book clubber, etc. We like to hike and travel together. When we retire we think about a place in the mountains. If we do that, we will certainly hike, canoe, take in nature, etc. together. But I’ll still do my separate stuff. Good to enjoy each other’s company but also give each other space.
My husband is a serious road bike rider…does two or three 100 mile rides a year. BUT he will ride with me on the rail trails which we both enjoy. We are members of the same gym…the only common class is yoga. We also enjoy summers when we can picnic at our lake club (had our first dinner there last night for this summer).
Both of us are looking forward to some longer trips once DH leaves his job. The ones we want to do are really three week trips.
We also like taking 5-6 day long weekend trips…and have already started to do more of these.
Ugh, CC is really being a drag on my marriage mojo today… between this and the retirement thread!!!
As you say @deb922 , I am not the same person I was decades ago. Same for H. I think we have been excellent parents but not always excellent marriage partners.
Our most common “hobby” is probably our kids and enjoying time with them. Next our cottage but when we are there we largely do different things.
My hobbies: fitness activities, gardening, reading, day trips or long weekend traveling, cooking, family activities
His hobbies: he used to have hobbies. He liked coin collecting, golfing in addition to the antiquing. Does neither of those now. Really, I can’t think of a hobby besides his part time job of selling on eBay. He doesn’t like to travel except to our cottage. Most of my trips the last several years - have been for work or with my kids/family. He opts to not go.
So no we don’t really share hobbies. (this honesty is KILLING me!!!)
We met as competitive runners at our place of employment (years ago). My husband still runs some but mainly cycles. I support that and he supports my running. We rarely run together, although we did in the past. We were both top competitive runners in our region and could get a little competitive with each other, too. We also enjoy shared TV shows, our pets and our church and community. I enjoy some of his biking group, even though I don’t bike unless I’m injured from running. He’s much more of a techno-geek than I am, although I’m good with technology. He has our friggin’ house so automated that I can’t work anything. I yell about it a lot. He’s also gotten really into the whole ancestry thing (both our families), which I find boring. This is why I am still working. My job offers us some fun travel opportunities, too. We also enjoy vacations and don’t seem to be as willing to branch out from our favorite places as I wish we were. We have a shared love for one Caribbean and one Colorado destination. We know a lot about our son’s sport (he is a top amateur) and support it- me from more of a running aspect and my husband on the cycling side.
We love exploring - nature, cities, topics, everything. We also just like being together. This past weekend, we tromped all over the woods around our cabin, surveying the boundary lines. Right now, we’re heading out to the hot tub to take a break during our work day.
We got together so many moons ago because we had so much in common. I’m more adventurous than H, but we have plenty of mutual interests - hiking, kayaking, skiing, concerts, museums, traveling, sports, gardening etc… we also both need alone time but I think that’s healthy.
No. I love outdoors activities, fitness and especially water sports. My husband doesn’t even know how to swim and the only thing he does outdoors is competitive shooting. I’m not terribly interested in guns.
We both enjoy doing things together with our boys, though.
My husband has no hobbies. I worry about him when he retires. Okay, that’s not one hundred percent true. We both hike, play board games (mostly only when kids are around), do the Thursday - Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles and read sci fi and fantasy and like eating fancy food and BBQ.
I also paint watercolors and Chinese brush painting (sometimes for money) and garden.
We do both enjoy traveling, both for hiking and art museuming.
No real shared hobbies but lots of shared interests? We both like the same music, so we enjoy going to concerts together or just hanging out listening to music on the stereo together. We both like hockey, but mostly we just watch it on tv. We travel well together but I wouldn’t say travel is a hobby. Like the OP, I don’t hike with my husband since I can’t really keep up and then I get annoyed. I do a lot of yoga on my own. I love to read. He is a big DIY’er and always has a project. He has some sports I don’t share-mountain biking, rock climbing, surfing. I had a little bit of that feeling of “subjugation” that I had given up my own interests, I used to go watch him surf or rock climb on weekends. I’ve definitely felt more of a balance in the last few years, I think because I really upped my yoga practice and we both juggle kid activities. I have my own thing, yoga, and he respects that time. I still like to sit on the beach and watch him surf! Plus I can bring a book!
We have a few things we both enjoy … mostly dining out and traveling. There are also some things we can do at the same time in the same room separately (me - spending too much time on the internet. Him - spending too much time on the internet but on different sites LOL.) He likes gardening which I have very little interest in other than enjoying having a nice looking garden.
I’m a Pokemon Go addict which he finds completely baffling in anyone over the age of 10.
We both enjoy singing in our church choir and he has also done community choir and tried to get me to join it but the rehearsals go until 10pm on a weeknight which seems very late (actually the real reason I haven’t done it yet is that the start time overlaps with me driving one of the kids home from one of their activities so maybe once that kid quits guitar or learns to drive I’ll try the community choir… but still, 10pm is late for me).
Nope. He does birdwatching, robotics, woodworking. I do singing in a chorus, water aerobics, sewing. Most years on our anniversary he’s mentoring the high school robotics team and I’m at rehearsal.
We both like watching baseball and we have season tickets to the National Geographic lecture series but those aren’t really hobbies.
Mr. B and I share a passion for planting things and growing things. If we are to downsize to a condo, we will need a patch of land where we could do such things. So no condo for us yet. We also like to tackle home improvement projects together, although I am worried that he will wreck himself with the stuff he still thinks he can do like hauling giant retaining wall blocks. We also like to watch movies, to travel, and to exercise together (each doing his/her own thing though). With a garage full of power tools, I think Mr. B can expand woodworking as a hobby (for which he has minimal time now). I envision many more bat and bird houses in our yard…
I forgot that we share a passion for college sports- mainly a college in our city that neither of us attended but one kid has a Master’s from there. We have basketball season tickets and follow the other sports and attend a few of those games each season.
@deb922, I’m wondering what business your friend has judging your marriage. Are you and your H reasonably satisfied with how things are? If so, then it ain’t broke, as they say.
H and I see comparatively little of each other (which is a good thing, actually). I’ve had to develop my own hobbies over the years because H is a workaholic and is gone from the house 80+ hours a week.
We do some traveling (just spent 3 days in NYC for a little R and R) and we always seem to have a good time. I’ve taken up golf and we sometimes do that together, although he is a moderate golfer and I’m terrible, so he if he wants to do 18 holes or a more challenging course, he goes with someone else. I used to go to all the football games, but I’ve given that up and can enjoy fall Sundays on my own. I like to read, garden, cook, study French, piano (sometimes), and do genealogy research. Most of those are individual pursuits anyways. H works out and runs, in addition to golf and following sports teams.
In the “there’s always more to learn” category, we’ve recently found that we both enjoy British crime dramas a la “Midsomer Murders” on Netflix, so that’s one of our relaxation activities these days.
DH’s hobbies are reading, watching Brit TV (and other dramas), cooking, eating, and napping. No sports, no exercise. A “hike” is about a mile for him. He still works 70 hrs/week and has no plans on retiring before 70; he enjoys the work and likes policymaking. Work is his identity. What friends he has are virtually all work-related. There are a few of his friends from HS and college where I maintain the contact, even though I didn’t know them at the time!
I’m not working, but still don’t refer to myself as retired – if I were medically able to work, I would be doing so. I have lots of hobbies – quilting (my big volunteer project), embroidery, photography, genealogy, DIY stuff around the house, some involvement at the synagogue. Also am into sports and will happily go to games, though S2 is overseas and my other friends aren’t into it, so I’ve not gone much recently. Am walking a lot and trying to get into better shape. The medical stuff limits me physically, but I refuse to give up.
We like to travel, camp and watch nerdy TV. If I can convince him to hike, I’m happy. We are both fairly introverted, but OMG, if DH is home, he is not thrilled if I’m doing something else, even if there is nothing else he wants to do. I’ve talked to him about picking up some new interests as he gets older, but he shuts down. I fully expect that he’ll work til he can’t do anything else, and that will be that.
I think that while it’s fine for a couple to have more varying interests than common ones, it feels like the lack of hobbies/interests portends a short and unhealthy retirement. That’s what worries me with DH.
No, not really. We used to enjoy traveling together, watching movies, and eating out. We used to fix the house together too. This was 20+ years ago.
He is married to his job. When not working, we don’t enjoy the same things. He wants to nap, and watch Netflix on his days off.
This is not stopping me from building a new post-kids life. I now plan my own vacations without him, and this has lessened the tension.
There are quite a few people in the hiking club I belong to that don’t hike or backpack or camp with their spouse or significant other.
My therapist suggested that being good roommates and good family to one another is a worthy goal for a decades long marriage. IDK, but it really stuck with me.
Another thing we talked about (therapy) was all the different marriages I’ve had…to the same man. There have been stages, some better than others.
The reason why this subject came up was that my friend is struggling in her marriage as their nest has emptied . Her husband has hobbies that consume a lot of time. He’s a pretty solitary person and is enjoying his empty nest by taking up a time consuming hobby. She’s resentful and wants her husband to join her in very social situations, going to festivals, out to dinner with friends and traveling to visit her relatives. He has no interest but wants her to follow him in his hobby. They are at an impasse between an extrovert and an introvert.
I said that post kids in the house that I have tried to take up some the hobbies that my H enjoys and that I know he is an introvert and try to limit social situations to people we both enjoy who share our interests.
She wasn’t up for that and told me that she feels that I have lost myself to my husbands interests. It wasn’t mean, it just isn’t anything she is interested in doing.
Just to give a little background to my question and to wonder how other couples navigate the post children section of life. BTW, her kids have all graduated from college so this isn’t a recent situation but an ongoing one.
