I know it had everything to do with me and nothing to do with him.
The conversation was something about Steve. Anyway he went something like, "Man you to don't have anything in common, I guess it's true opposites attract huh?"
I took umbrage. We are very alike in a lot of ways. But they aren't necessarily specifically in the area of hobbies. I mean we tend to like similar TV shows, and go see movies together and do the everyday chores and shopping together, occasionally go rollerblading together and the like. But what we do with our free time can be pretty different. Even if we are both on the computer we do differet activites.
For the most part we are pretty tolerant of the other person's hobbies (my dogs, his jujitsu etc.) and don't get in the way and are generally fairly supportive of the other person doing what they want to do.
I guess what tees me off is the idea that in order for a relationship to work you have to spend every waking hour of every free minute together doing things with each other.
What I see happening in relationships where this is true is that an uneven balance of power develops and one person of the couple starts always giving in to the others wishes. Very rarely do I actually see them alternating between one persons preferece and the others, and very rarely are the two people's interests SO identical that they always want to be doing the exact same activity (though it can happen).
Bob's counter argument was that time is so precious you should be wanting to spend every minute with your beloved. Nice in theory I just don't see it working in practice. Very few people actually treat time like it is precious. Most people take it for granted, and waste loads of time daily with or sans "beloved". So the argument doesn't hold water.
posted
Spending every minute with your beloved sounds boring. After awhile nobody has anything new and vital to bring to the relationship.
My sister in-law and her hubby are joined at the hip. If you talk to one of them, you've talked to both of them.
Posts: 2655 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
I suspect most of hatrack will be in your camp eslaine, so this probably isn't the forum to actually get an unbiased discussion going. But it's worth a try.
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Some people just aren't built to spend all their time with each other. I have a very hard time if I don't get to spend part of my day alone.
It bugs me too when people assume because my personality is different than theirs, that I must not love my wife very much.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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I'm just gonning to go ahead and say that if someone gave me the chance to spend every waking moment with Annie I would take it. Relationships are kind of like children, you know what happens when you try to apply the same method and theory of raising child one to child two.
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yes but that's slightly different hobbes because you are in a long-distance relationship to begin with. once it becomes a near-distance relationship, you might view things slightly differently.
Would Annie (and Annie feel free to answer) actually want you hanging over her shoulder every single minute she is trying to create Art?
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I would have taken such a chance when I was in a university relationship as well. Now, though, I wouldn't. I require time with both myself and my male mysoginist friends (I'm kidding, my male friends aren't mysoginists). So remind me to ask you the same question again when you're old and grey like me Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
That's my point AJ, each relationship is different, and different things have an effect on each relationship. I'm not advocating our good friend Bob's position so much as I'm saying that don't go to the other extreme and declare him always wrong, just recognize that everyone has a way of making a relationship work, and trying to assign a judgment on how well it works besides how well the realtionship actually does is pretty silly.
posted
I guess the other thing that bothers me is that people view Hobbies as something being in opposition to Relationships unless both parties are involved in the same Hobby.
posted
I cracked up at AJ's post, because when I saw Art capitalized, I figured it was a name, perhaps of their firstborn son. "Hanging over her shoulder" just doesn't sound quite right in that case....
Posts: 6213 | Registered: May 2001
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Yes Hobbes, every relationship is unique, but people do and are passing judgment on everyone all the time even if it is unconscous. Perhaps those of us on Hatrack pass jugdment less or are kinder in their judgements than the rest of the world, but maybe we are fooling ourselves too in our Hatrack ivory tower.
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hee hee Moose, the reason why I used generic "Art" was because I know Annie likes using several artistic mediums and I didn't want to select one and then look blatantly stupid for picking a "wrong" one.
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Well now I'm hopelessly confused as to what we're arguing (or agreeing) about. Basically I just said that you don't have to like all the same hobbies and spend every waking moment together, but applying the reverse (that you can't have the same hobbies or not want to spend all possible time together) is just as wrong, because there is no pre-determined RIGHT way of making a relationship work besides just plain making it work. That's as far as I went, now we seem to be on something else and I don't know what it is, or what the position you think I've taken on it.
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I always need me-time. Time to write, read, work on my photography, study, any of that stuff.
My definition of a relationship wouldn't involve two people being totally dependent on each other. That would annoy the crap out of me. I want another individual who has compassion, who is his own person with likes, dislikes and hobbies.
And when our hobbies coincide, WOOHOO! Like zombie and disaster movies, Halo, hiking, things of that sort. 'Cause then you can do stuff together.
But to do EVERYTHING together?
It seems then you would stand to lose your individuality.
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:I suspect most of hatrack will be in your camp eslaine, so this probably isn't the forum to actually get an unbiased discussion going. But it's worth a try.
::sits down in eslaine's camp:: Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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Hobbes, it's just that it's sort of amusing for you to take the "every-waking-moment relationships are for me!" stance when we all know you're thousands of miles away from your sweetheart. Most of us have been there and remember how it feels, and how different it is from how it feels to live with someone all the time. Still loving and exciting, yes, but way more subdued. It has to be. You can't pine for someone when you wake up with them every day.
I'm amazed at how much more effort goes in to keeping each other amused now that my fiance and I have been living together for four years. After so much time, we know all of our jokes, all of our opinions, all of our quirky little idiosyncrasies.... so if we weren't both constantly trying new things and doing things separately, we would have little more to talk about than the weather when we were together. Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
For the first fifteen years of my marriage I was on the road about 30-percent of the time. I was surprised that was almost a perfect balance for our particular personalities. My wife had plenty of time to indulge in her hobbies, and at just about the point where she'd reached hobby saturation, I'd come home.
I haven't been on the road for nearly six months now, and we're both starting to get a bit stale.
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Spending all your time with the same person would be fantastically draining, to say nothing of boring.
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The fact that I'm in a long distance relationship and want to spend way more time with Annie than most people would want to spend with their SO is my complete and entire point. The relationship we're in changes what it takes to keep it together, and how we want it to work.
quote:You can't pine for someone when you wake up with them every day. [EDIT] Spending all your time with the same person would be fantastically draining, to say nothing of boring.
It's statements like that that I'm disagreeing with. Definte have-tos and can't-dos may exist in one relationship but that doesn't mean they can't in any other. I think that's what bugged AJ so much, is that Bob was saying "here's how a relationship works" and she was saying "that's not how it works for me".
posted
But you don't know how much time you would want to spend with her if you were living together. I think that's AJ's point.
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Well it's true, I don't since currently we are sepereated by multiple states, I don't know how much time I will want to spend with her when we work it out so we're living close to each other.
posted
Pardon me. Spending all your time with the same person would be fantastically draining, and boring, for me. Different adjectives will obviously apply to different people, though I doubt "healthy" is one of them.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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RB, your posts are one of the chief reasons I lurk in the VR on Ars. You almost never fail to crack me up.
celia, if I am old and grey you must be young and sexy. (Bonus points to whoever recognizes the band name in that sentence.)
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
I think the most important part is to respect each other's hobbies. I've definitely seen a few people in relationships in which one person treats the other's hobby with disdain. And that ain't good.
Beyond that, I think it's personal preference. I find that I only really want to date people who have fascinating hobbies and a strong interest in those hobbies. It's not necessary that I join them at their hobby, but I want to be able to appreciate it in some fashion. Like I'd want to enjoy watching them, or seeing the results, or attending shows with them. I'd like the vice versa to be true as well.
Posts: 1892 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Suneun--exactly. It's happened to me. I've been in a relationship where the other person got pissed off that I went to the gym daily and didn't spend that time with him.
I invited him along.
But then he decided he couldn't go with me because he didn't think it was right.
Also kept telling me I'd "better not turn into a she-woman of muscles."
In general, he got pissy that I didn't spend EVERY WAKING MOMENT with him. It made me pretty damn resentful of him.
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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Wait, before we move on I need closure! Are we agreed that Bob was wrong that AJ needed to have the same hobbies and spend almost all of her time with Steve to have a healthy relationship, and are we agreed that what was wrong about that was that he was impressing his type of relationship on AJ, not that he just happened to have the wrong type of relationship?
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*nods* I had this rule that we didn't see each other on Sundays and Wednesdays. I need days to be alone. When I was in school, I was alone while studying and that worked, but since I now work in an office around people, I need to spend at two nights a week where I can be by myself. I need that time to think and be me again.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
I love Mr. Opera dearly, but spending all of my free time with him would drive me beserk. I *have* to have alone time, otherwise I get very grumpy. Some of our hobbies are the same, like hiking, but others are very different. This is fun in its own way, b/c I get to tease him that Clint Eastwood movies are boring, and he gets to tell me that paying 79 cents for a piece of scrapbook paper is crazy. I only get concerned when our worldviews don't match up on big things like parenting philosophies, etc.
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That was the hardest thing for me when I served an LDS mission -- never being alone. I wend kinda batty. I feel sorry for those poor companions of mine.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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I know exactly where you're coming from, mph. I have some friends who hate being alone, and I have never been able to understand that. For me being alone is akin to renewal. It also stops the urges to run around screaming like a lunatic.
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I had a few companions to whom I never said a word inside the apartment. It wasn't anything to do with them, I just needed to be by myself, and it was the only way to do it.
I have this theory that that's part of the reason I was such a bookworm as a kid. As one of four kids in a house, it's hard to get privacy, but if I was reading a book, I could block out everyone.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
I was out at Purdue for two months one summer, and I lived in the dorms all by myself. Four out of five nights a week I would spend completely by myself.
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Hobbes, I don't think it's a matter of coming to consensus. Though I also got lost about BannaOJ's feelings. I guess I'm in your camp because I had to stare at this a long time before I realized it said "hobbles" and not "Hobbes." (Edit: cool Freudian typo, eh? of course I meant "hobbies")
Maybe I'm confused because of the use of capitalized "Hobbies". Is there some kind of transcendent concept of a "Hobby" that is escaping me? (More edit, while I'm here) I don't know that I have any hobbies on the order of dog showing. Unless you count Hatrack.
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Personally, I can't think of anyone I'd want to spend every waking moment with. As Space Opera said, I'd go berserk.
Now, that's coming from a bachelor's point of view, and I'm not currently in any relationship.
I think though, that it's all a matter of personality. Bob the Weightlifter is not right in trying to impress his needs or views on someone else's relationship (and, of course, this begs the question: where was his SO?), but if his (and his SO's) personality are such that they can spend that much time together, more power to them. He needs to understand that those of us with more melancholy/analytical/pick-your-own-term-for-this-personality-type NEED the alone time that several of you have mentioned.
Posts: 159 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
Yeah, I was out at Purdue during the summer of 1998. I really liked the place the surrounding countryside. I came *this* close to getting my masters (mechanical engineering) out at Purdue. It actually would have been cheaper than doing it at BYU.
I'd love to make it out there again some time. Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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