[nonpartisanartisan]

Finding the spouse and then trying to bend them to share your passions is a recipe for a headache, or at least an earache.

Mad Dog (not on this forum) recommended spending two weeks in close quarters with your potential spouse with the knowledge that things will never really get better in the relationship than they are in those two weeks.

This is where you find out that you cannot tolerate their personal hygeine and they cannot tolerate your "sergeant major" attitude to doing some things. I could rant that before I got married my fiance stalled on me buying a 17' Siren - yet I know I was still free to make my own decisions and simply was blind to how the only boat she would go on was a cruise ship. To me a cruise ship is a prison ship to me, that ain't sailing, but she wants it since they cook, clean and do everything else. Also odd is I get seasick on a Caribbean cruise ship but not in a 14 foot dink heeled in 20 knot winds with a 6 foot chop racing in the ice cold water of Lake Ontario. Ah.. the screaming and breaking fiberglass in the afternoon. Sounds like... panic.

I believe that to get the spouse interested there are four key steps:
1) Is there any interest... for my wife there never was and she gets seasick riding in a car heading for a cruise ship.
2) Awareness of communication (search out the four horsemen of the apocalypse as discussed in Blink and find out if one of the key four communication blocks are being thrown - both in the proposal and later in life on board.)
3) A common agreement in advance as to what is involved - you cannot skip and cook at the same time, they need to study to be able to helm and navigate should something happen, personal hygiene & environmental issues - someone here could probably provide a better list than me
4) Reopening the conversation after each trip to what worked, what didn't and how to improve things. Some people are afraid to talk about how to change things in a productive manner and find it easier to pick a fight and use that as an excuse not to go back on the boat and not to let you go back yourself.

Do I know this from sailing? No, she didn't let me get the Siren. I learned it from a variety of other efforts... canoe, bike, camp, ski cross country, ski alpine, ... (the list is long.) The compatibility issue is strange.

- Ron