You're a lucky man Bob!
My wife fishes with me, and will occasionally hunt with me (she walks along with me - enjoying the dog work, and closes her eyes if a bird flushes!). She used to be squeamish about it, but over the years she has really learned to enjoy the culinary aspects of hunting, and that has added a lot to how much she supports the amount of time that I spend afield (I'm a pretty damned good cook - if I do say so myself - and I make extra effort to give wild game the attention and respect that it deserves in the kitchen...).
That said, I've got to be honest, hunting and fishing is a frequent source of friction in our house. By the end of hunting season the wife is likely to get pretty tired of having been abandoned every single Saturday for three months. It's getting better every year though, as she gets used to it (I've only been INSANE about hunting for the last 3-4 years). As my interest in hunting has grown over the years we have been finding ways to compromise though. For example, I will devote a lot of effort throughout the year to all the stuff that she wants to do, with the understanding (which I tell here REPEATEDLY) that this bathroom renovations (or whatever honey-do it is THIS time) should not be forgotten come October! The other issue is that while I have endless hobbies, many/most of which do not necessarily involve her, she seems to have very few that do not involve me! I find this a bit frustrating, so I have been trying to encourage her to develop her own hobbies/friend network etc... This one is a bit delicate because she has FOUR times uprooter her whole life to follow me around for my education and work, so she constantly has to make new friends etc... and as a result I think has come to rely on me a bit more than she would otherwise. Last year I got her a bunch of passes for two people for ladies night golf lessons for the summer. I had hoped that she would bring a friend and they'd get into it, but it fizzled out once the passes ran out. Since I personally despise playing golf, she doesn't seem to want to get into it as much as I had hoped. This year though she said that she was planning to buy her own clubs, so hopefully the interest has not died out completely... The other factor which I think will have to change soon is that we only have one car. As a result, when I'm gone she is limited as to what she can do. ONce my own work situation stablizes or improves a bit I think that we'll have to think about getting a second car so that the excuse of "I need you to be around to go and do this or that with the car" is removed. The thing that I find most helpful is to give her LOTS of notice about when I plan to go, so that she can make her own plans and/or run around with the car and get whatever gardening/interior decorating materials she wants for that day when I'm going to be gone. Nothing goes over worse than a last-minute decision to run out the door when she has nothing lined up.
Guess I'll just have to keep working towards 53 years of marriage (congrats by the way Bob!). By then, she'll either be used to me going, or so tired of me that she'll be HAPPY to see me out of the house! haha!
-Croc
