Wedded to the sea and wedded to your wife?
There’s a good reason polygamy is mostly illegal,
It mostly doesn’t work.
Bless him he tried. In One hand for yourself, One for the ship, Tristan Jones – an un-politically correct relic of an un-politically correct age – did try to be positive about women sailors:-
“There is a period when they seem to go to pieces emotionally, though a few get over this.”
It was pretty clear though that he didn’t think they belonged anywhere near a small sailboat (at least not one he was on):-
“You only have to see her, after a long ocean voyage, scrunching her bare toes in the sand, lingeringly touching stray flower blossoms, gazing at children…”
But then I never really felt TJ had a natural understanding of women, possibly for the same reason he branched out into gay fiction towards the end of his life.
Truth is I’m not all that politically correct myself and I’ve always regarded sailing as an archetypal blokes occupation. It is after all completely pointless, frequently uncomfortable and occasionally dangerous. Most women have more sense.
I’ve only met a couple of women in my sailing life who’ve come close to challenging my preconceptions. A disinterest in the senselessness of sailing, a distaste for the privations and a deficiency of the testosterone needed to ignore (or even embrace) the risks are a pretty toxic combination. Loving sailing isn’t something you can fake and being in a potentially dangerous situation for no good reason without the confidence and the skills to handle things if they go wrong does not make for a happy other half.
A couple of unfortunate imbalances seem to stand out here. It seems there are far more men than women who love sailing, and it seems there are far more women than men who insist on coming along in spite of that. These imbalances seem to spell trouble for more than a few of us. If you’re one of them, wedded to both sea and a wife who doesn’t much care for it, you have my sympathies and it seems to me four possible solutions.
The sit-com solution
Strife with the wife has been a staple of the sit-com since the sit-come was first born and life seems to imitate art for many of the married sailors I’ve met. It’s the annual summer holiday and they’re spending a week or two on the boat pottering around some favourite harbours. He wants to sail as much as possible, as far as possible and anchor away from it all rather than marina-hop while she wants to spend as much time as possible looking around the towns, sitting in the cafes or exercising the credit card in the local tat-shops.
Most sailing blokes tend to wince when they talk about their other half and their sailing, but then most blokes I know tend to wince when they talk about their other half and any of their hobbies, interests or sources of enjoyment in general. A simmering resentment seems to be the norm for so many couples when it comes to dividing up free time between what each of them wants to do and the time they seem to feel they need to spend together. All too often they end up compromising and compromise is what separates a winner and a loser from two losers, neither fully happy and neither getting what they really want.
If this sounds like you, you can take some solace from the fact you’re far from alone. And I’m certainly not complaining – I’m single, and I love a good sit-com.
The grown-up solution
Most marriages to me are more redolent of Stockholm Syndrome than true love and the sit-com situation many couples find themselves in seems to me to be born of a misguided and possibly incurably unhealthy view of what love is and what a relationship means.
But this is certainly not always the case, some seem to make it work. For example, a couple I know spent an extended summer’s sailing around Scotland and Ireland this year. He loves sailing and she absolutely hates it, yet they both thoroughly enjoyed their holiday. How did they pull off this magical feat? Simple, she never went sailing. She explored the towns and the country and they hooked up at each next port of call. They spent the evenings and the odd rest day together, they both slept on the boat, but when he was out at sea her feet stayed firmly on dry land.
By way of another example, one of those handful of women I’ve met who genuinely loves sailing happens to be married to a bloke who can’t stand it. When they go on holiday she’ll sail for the week and he’ll go hiking or just chill out with a pint or three on shore ’til they meet up again in the evenings.
Call it creative problem solving or simply a willingness to be open minded about what it is to be a couple, it’s not at all hard to make it work and work really well for both of you. It just takes a little thought and no compromising.
The stand-down solution
The number of boys toy’s that become second-hand market bargains each year are a sad reminder that all too many of us decide to give up and give in to our other half. Again, I’m certainly not complaining – I picked up my boat that way.
It’s easy to frown on life’s quitters but I think I have more respect for the guys who throw in the towel over those stuck in a Groundhog Day of fractious sailing holidays for only on the surface is this quitting. Underneath it’s really just a compromise of a different kind, trading a dream and a passion for a more peaceful and hassle-free life (and probably a few Brownie points as well). It’s not a compromise with their partners but a compromise with themselves – a win for their wife and something closer to a zero-sum game for themselves.
The trade-in solution
This may seem flippant to you if you’re one of those people who regards our soaring divorce rates as a bad thing, but I don’t share your point of view. Life is far too short and far too precious to fritter away in a second rate relationship. A worthy marriage is surely one in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and where you both get more out of being together than you put in to being together?
If that’s not the case for you, perhaps you’d be better off changing your wife rather than changing yourself. In fact, perhaps you’d both be better off that way.
