I’ve realised something recently. I might be wrong, but this seems to be my experience.
Hobbies are something that you use to fill your time, and generally seem to be something that you do on your own. Sure, there are some team sports out there, but the majority of what you’d call a “hobby” is something that you do selfishly. And that’s fine. After all, it’s your life. Doing things that give you a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment is a good thing, and those hobbies are sometimes hard to come by.
But if you chart your life, especially that life when you include significant others, I think you’ll find that the level of hobbies is inversely proportionate to the time you spend with your partner.
Prior to a relationship, you are likely to have a lot of time that is yours alone, so you spend it on hobbies. These could be anything; in my case it was things like gaming, taking language lessons and writing visual novels.
Then, something happens. You meet someone and start to devote that time to them. Since you usually have constraints on time like work and sleep, you need to cut into your hobbies. But that’s fine – now you’re spending time with a partner, and that’s good. You can likely find a lot of fulfillment with a partner, be it spiritual, intellectual, sexual or any mix of the above. You might be lucky and have found someone through a hobby, like cycling or rock climbing or slam poetry or whatever, but chances are you’ll only share one or two of your hobbies from the outset.
If all goes well, you’re likely to move towards some kind of long-term arrangement, such as marriage, de-facto/civil union, or simply just living together. This usually happens at the peak of your time spent with each other. Unfortunately, I’m in China now and can’t find the correct source, but I believe that it was in Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise there is a graph that shows that peak happiness happens around the time couples get married. This would make sense – leading up to this you increase your “time investment” in your partner, and then after that you’ve already “done the deed” and bigger life issues come into play – kids, mortgages, careers etc…
At a certain point, you start to slip. You’ve fallen into particular patterns, and you know your significant other well enough that you’re not doting on their time. The sex life dwindles, and if you’re raising kids, they stop demanding every spare second of your time. Initially, this comes as a shock – you have time to burn but you don’t know what to do with it.
Eventually, you stop feeling guilty about indulging in that time on your own, and you might start to pick up hobbies again. You know enough about your partner now not to bother them with things they’re not interested in, so you do it on your own.
But I think that this also signals the end of the “intimate phase” of a relationship. You’re not trying to impress your partner anymore. You’ve both decided that you’ve made enough deposits into the relationship bank and you can simply live off the interest. However, it is those deposits that lead to the more intimate moments, so when you stop making them you’ve now also shut off that deeper relationship. You might stay together for decades after that point, however I feel that when you start picking up solo hobbies again, you’ve moved onto a more dormant phase of your relationship.
In other news, I’ve bought a telescope. I used to do a lot of stargazing as a kid but never really had the right gear. Tokyo isn’t the greatest place to look at the stars, but I’m going to do what I can! I’ve also bought a lot of photo attachments so I’m hoping that in the coming months I can to share some stellar photography with you. It’s likely to be a long road of small improvements, but then again, that’s what a hobby is about, right?
Cpl Crud's Writings 