how do you justify this hobby with your spouse?

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Man my wife just complains constantly about all the rocket stuff, and time spent playing with these toys. Even though my 10 year old is doing it with me, she knows i am having far too much fun. We had a great launch friday after noon doing about 8 flights around 1,200 ft at peek. I offered for her to come, but unless we were coloring hair, or doing nails she isn't intrested. Any tips? i know some of you "grown" men have spouses here! :y:

I was "thanking" my wife (*tra L2*) the other day for being a "cool" chick. And told her i am so happy she isn't high maintinence... we joked about the 1 timer wives... you see them at a launch 1 time, and never again....(which is better than the nevertimers...)

I do rocketry with my 3 children.... the 1 yearold I have a feeling will be the one who really takes on... the 7 yearold, just thinks its common place part of life.

There are 2 things that made my wives active participation possible. She actualy enjoys to see me play.... we make that important just as a basis for successful marriage.. It means, may have to get excited over a new Nail gel coat curing machine too.... or, note that i love the new hair color, and the "accent" she got...
The second thing, is we play together... i remind her constantly that i like the "family" hobby, but isnt family to me if she doesnt participate, AND, that she and i need to "play" too... so we will build rockets together.

this last year, with my son really wanting to get hands on with something "POWERFULL" its clear it wont be a "family" hobby any longer.. so.. she and i are going to take a vacation this year and make it some couple time without kids...


Give her a rocket... say its something you want to do with her. (JUST HER).
 
Give her a rocket... say its something you want to do with her. (JUST HER).

Nope. Not working with my wife (tried it). It is good to tie in the kids/grandkids if they are so inclined, but also helps if you cater to your spouse's interests with a few tradeoffs, e.g., I bought her a new one of these today:

2013_Arctic_Cat_500_Core_with_EFI.jpg
 
Nope. Not working with my wife (tried it). It is good to tie in the kids/grandkids if they are so inclined, but also helps if you cater to your spouse's interests with a few tradeoffs, e.g., I bought her a new one of these today:

View attachment 105542

HAHAA!!!! so do you get to borrow it for launch day???

Yep, tradoffs, and making sure you both get your kicks.... only way to go.
 
Nope. Not working with my wife (tried it). It is good to tie in the kids/grandkids if they are so inclined, but also helps if you cater to your spouse's interests with a few tradeoffs, e.g., I bought her a new one of these today:

View attachment 105542

I have a feeling one of these could come in handy for rocket retrieval duties.
 
Hopefully I will never get to the point where I have to justify a hobby like this to a girlfriend/spouse...if so, the rockets came first.


We'll see how that argument goes...
 
Sorry guys, I came to this thread late. So how do I justify this hobby to my spouse you ask? Simple,I dont. She dont care what I do as long as the mortage is paid. We have total trust. We are not married, but have been together for over 15 years. I just placed a 2600$ order with Ken at Performance Hobbies. When I told her she said,HOLY SH*$,have fun and Merry Christmas. I will of course be paying for this, but she is the best in the world!!
 
Don't need to justify it. We've been married 23 years. She understands that my hobbies are part of what makes me who I am, and appreciates that I am different. She actually encourages me to have hobbies. She sees too many sad, depressed husbands who just sit around the house watching TV and drinking beer and have no real interests. She says she is happy that I am happy out in the garage building rockets. "It could be worse. You could be out spending our money on gambling and prostitutes."

She's a keeper.
 
We went through the 5 Stages of Marital Grief over my rocketry habit after I resumed it eight years ago. Shock, anger, denial, bargaining, etc. We finally got to acceptance when the two of us traveled down to Pennsylvania in 2009 so that I could attend a couple of days of NARAM. While there she saw firsthand that very normal, well-adjusted adult men, women, young folks and families actually did avidly participate in it and that it was a well-organized hobby. She saw hundreds of people doing the same kinds of things that I had been doing, which may have reassured her that, no, I hadn't lost my mind and hadn't turned into some kind of freak. For my part I had to agree to a few rules, too. The big one was that I had to stop occupying the entire dining room for months at a time and using it as a workshop. I also had to cut back a little and start allocating time for other things instead of devoting every single waking hour of every single day to building rockets. We worked it out. And finally, after a couple of years she saw that I was more of a penny-pincher than she had realized and that in fact I was not going to blow the mortgage payment each month buying ridiculous amounts of stuff for this new preoccupation of mine.
 
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My wife is a geologist and has an intense love for collecting gems and minerals. I can look at one of her rocks and say, "Oh that's nice..." and be done with it while she pores over the same specimen for 5 minutes or more examining every little segment of it. I have learned to appreciate her hobby and know a little bit about gems and minerals and she in turn has come to appreciate rocketry. I go with her to gem shows and she goes with me to rocket launches. She actually enjoyed the launches more than she thought she would the first time she went. I have been trying to get her to build a rocket, but that hasn't happened yet. I think it will in due time.

Out of this my advice to you is to spend time with your spouse on her hobby. If she doesn't have one, concince her to start. It can be anything. Once she develops a passion for it, she will be better able to understand your passion for rocketry.
 
So I get home last night from work and immediately go the Stink-Eye. On the kitchen counter was the Sirius Interrogator-G box that just arrived (free-2-day shipping from Cyber Monday deal). Relatively big box. Wife looked up the credit card record before I got home. I looked like a little lost puppy. But smoothed things over as she just got into her own little hobby by just admitting that "no - it wasn't a cheap little rocket." Good thing I am not into HPR. Yet. ;)
 
Out of this my advice to you is to spend time with your spouse on her hobby. If she doesn't have one, convince her to start. It can be anything. Once she develops a passion for it, she will be better able to understand your passion for rocketry.

This. My wife is a voracious reader and history buff. I actually felt a bit guilty about rockets until I realized that it's not a big deal for us to drop $1000+ on a weekend where we go browse through a historical site. (History is _not_ my thing at all) I don't know how much money has been put through her kindle, or in the books shes bought locally or online - but they're not inexpensive. And I don't ask. It helps that my daughter and I fly together - my wife never comes. It's a daddy-daughter thing, and I suspect she likes the 3-4 hours of peace and quiet so she can read another book.
 
So I get home last night from work and immediately go the Stink-Eye. On the kitchen counter was the Sirius Interrogator-G box that just arrived (free-2-day shipping from Cyber Monday deal). Relatively big box. Wife looked up the credit card record before I got home. I looked like a little lost puppy. But smoothed things over as she just got into her own little hobby by just admitting that "no - it wasn't a cheap little rocket." Good thing I am not into HPR. Yet. ;)
She'll change her mind when she sees how beautiful it is. It's a great kit, enjoy!
 
I am with a lot of the guys who have suggested a turn-based approach. In my first marriage her and I compromised on everything and it resulted in neither of of getting what we wanted.

What we do now in the house is everyone has their own day of the week when they can do whatever they want (within reason obviously), they get pampered, and they are excused from all chores.

So instead of living a life when I never get to do something fun or watch a war movie because I know my wife would hate it, I now know that at least once a week I get to be king. I could literally get home at 5pm and play video games until midnight, guilt free because I know my wife gets her day, too. My kids are 5 and 2 and they also get their own days.

I'm not saying this will work for you, but it has worked amazingly well for us.
 
Tell her that rockets are a lot cheaper than fast cars, or motorcycles, and a lot less trouble than fast women.
 
... a lot cheaper than fast cars, or motorcycles, and a lot less trouble than fast women.

My wife tells everyone "it's better than another woman and a bunch of lawyers!" And to boot she joined me at Plaster Blaster this year and enjoyed it!
 
A really good thread all.... some sound, honest, respectful advice.
After 30 years together all I can say is what others have said already - communication, sharing, find balance between time for yourself and time for her... all the things here.
On one occasion when I did hit a four digit expense in one moth it did come as a surprise. After she made it clear her displeasure seeing such a large VISA bill I realized I need to not have surprises like that (actually surprised me how it all added up too...) but she understood this like any other active interest (motorcycle, fishing, scuba, whatever... can be an expensive activity.

This can go form a cheap $20-30 kit hobby to a few more digits really easily ;-)

Again balance and communication.
 
My wife only tolerates rockets at best. I work 50 hours a week at my main job and another 10 to 20 on side jobs. And once a month I take my boys and my girls if they want to go, and I go to our monthly launch. I know it bugs her sometimes. I ask her to go but she thinks its boring, I support her in her hobbies and she spends way more than I do in a month. Fortunately she is smart and reasonable for the most part :) and as long as I make sure to spend time with her, she is ok with it. Best thing to do is pay into the wife bank first. If you married a reasonable woman she will have a hard time giving you grief if you taken care of your responsibilities first. And you got to involve your kids its what makes life fun.


TA
 
My wife has no problem with my rockets or any of my other hobbies. I include her at the launches, etc and we make a day of it. We have a picnic on-site and afterwards on the way home we dine out at a place of her choice. Works well for us both.
 
tell your wife that f she looked at all the space news and space companies coming out then she would know there is a big future in rockets and space therefor its a good job field because what is on earth will be needed in space.
 
My wife doesn't care that I do it. She said she loves that I'm "nerdy". But I use the kids as an excuse for my continuation of the hobby. I am putting together a "family and friends" launch in March. As part of our Christmas letter she decided to put that info in there. So she must not be too big of a hater. lol
 
"Nerdy" is not a bad thing. I prefer it and that is why I married my wife. She is a bigger nerd than I am. As I said before, my wife has joined my in the hobby, but before she did. I sold it as a way to get more family time away from the video games and TVs.
 
This year for Christmas my wife bought me a Big Red Bee GPS tracking system for my high power rockets. OK, she pretty much insisted that I order one as I lost one of my rockets last year and spent hours and hours looking for it. She said the GPS system was a good deal as I had at least that much money tied up in the lost rocket not to mention all of the time building it and looking for it. The rocket was returned to me 5 months later as the farmer whose land we use had found it and put it in his barn. The rocket was undamaged.

We support each other's interests. She was looking at getting a new embroidery (sewing) machine, but she balked at the $4,000 quote I received from a dealer. I had to email a request for the price as no one is allowed to advertise the price of this particular brand of machines. That was twice as high as I expected, but I would have been fine with it if she had wanted it. I told her at that price it was going to be her Christmas/birthday/anniversary/groundhog day present.
 
When I was dating my wife, I was powerlifting & doing quite nicely. She married me anyhow. I got hurt & was out of sport for some time, and when I could I started racing road bicycles semi-pro. There's a hobby that kills relationships! Work full time, train 37 hours a week and race every weekend from march thur Dec. She went to a stage race once, and that was more then enough...come off the bike sore, hungry & tired, eat like a pig and go to bed until the next day, then eat & race some more...not exactly fun for the spouse. In comparison this is a piece of cake, breakfast at the hotel, lunch at the field, dinner at a nice restaurant & some swimming. Guess I'm lucky she understood that I did other things...
 
My wife actually liked it when I was road racing. She encouraged it, drove support vehicles and otherwise participated whenever she could. She eventually grew concerned about the constant travel and the cumulative expense of it all, but it was my decision to quit, not hers. Same thing with speedskating. Those were all well behind me when I resumed my involvement in rocketry. It took her awhile to warm up to it and it is still not at all her thing, but she is happy about the fact that I get to participate in it with others, have made a number of new friends through it, and that compared to when I was road racing it is downright cheap. All those things, and especially the last one. ;)
 
I was a cat 2 wanna be cat 1. Ten stage races, the entire NRC that I could get into, trips to canada and france with a silver in the etepe de tour du france. The next spring I crashed at bear mountain (NY), putting my humeral head thru the scapula. Came back 18 months later as a Cat 3, now I'm just having fun at the local / regional level. 15-20 hours keeps you racey at that level. My son likes rockets to racing....unless I win :>
 
I don't. Unless she counts me being out of her hair. It's only when I disappear into the hobbit hole for weeks on end does she finally make a comment...
 
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