Romantic Partners who game

[greyorm]

Here's my thought based on the big issue: why should or should not one attempt to interest one's romantic partner in role-playing?

I'm guessing this is such a non-issue to me that I skipped right over it. Those still in the dating and courting stages of relationships might find such a discussion useful, but for me, personally, the same issue has been discussed so thoroughly elsewhere in regards to any imaginable activity that bringing it up specifically for the context of RPGs seems a bit absurd.

That is, one might as well ask, "Why should or should not one attempt to interest one's romantic partner in sail-boating?" for all the useful insight it would provide into the subject of sail-boating specifically.
This is a much broader issue than any specific hobby or passtime.

Now Clinton did have some very interesting thoughts on the matter from the RPG-specific perspective, but I have to wonder how much an issue self-exploration actually is with most gamers -- and by this I mean conscious self-exploration -- and more-to-the-point, if it is even a valid argument for "why not"?

All the examples of "why not" Clinton cites are clear indicators to me that something on the relationship's fundamental level is wrong. Such issues go way beyond whether you and your partner should be gaming together or not.

Personally, if anyone confided in me that they were using RPGs to explore those sorts of issues in their current relationship, or if I caught myself using it for such, I would be on the phone or suggesting the other individual get on the phone to a good relationship counselor, setting up a meeting, because there are much larger issues at stake with the relationship itself.

One more qualifier: individual instances are not evidence for anything. Anecdotes about what happened to you or to your friend Ned or Sally or whoever aren't going to address my question. I'm interested in broader perspectives on this one.

Statistics are made from individual instances.  I know I'd be interested in any source of statistics on this particular issue. Have any, Ron?

That said, I'm responding to this not in regards to Ron's question, but in response to the issue that arose from this which interests me most (selfish bastard that I am): perception and fact, in regards to the gender split and social stigma (or lack thereof) of gaming.

As queried previously, is it really that difficult to find a mate that games, such that having such is really worth any sort of awe over, or discussion of?  Or is the situation more along the lines of, "My partner plays chess with me!" (Which, I think, we can all see as "unh, yeah, and?")

What are the facts in this situation, and what are the preconceptions?  Do the latter have any actual relationship to the former?

[hardcoremoose]

I'm not sure I have a helluva a lot to add ot the discussion, except to say that I, for one, have used roleplaying to explore occasionally troubling relation-ship oriented issues.

Fact: Last October I was married.

In November Matt started up a Mage game.  In that game, my character, Leslie Welles, was a newlywed who was convinced that his wife was actually an alien come to Earth to create hybrid progeny.  Even her goldfish was in on the conspiracy.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have some strange hangups regarding procreation.  Namely, I'm not planning on doing it (and fortunately, neither does my wife).  And being recently married is a big enough change to warrant a little bit thought on anyone's part.

Did I learn anything from this?  Maybe a little.  Did it somehow make my relationship better or worse or anything?  No.  But it was a way to express my feelings and - I don't want to say "work through them" - but, you know, kinda' get them out there and in the open.  It was pretty scary actually, exposing yourself like that in front of a group of people who knew exactly where it was all coming from.

And I probably couldn't have done it if my wife had been there.  The story had a happy ending and all, but there were some pretty scary moments.  Bold, intense, and scary moments.

So that's that.

- Scott

[Paul's Girl]

Well, as *kinda* the subject of the post that started this entire thread (if I knew how to link to it I would, but I don't know how too, sorry), I would like to contribute.  After Paul and I had been dating a while, he told me about gaming and how he had gotten back into it recently. He was going to run a game for three friends (Tom who is in our present game group and two others) of Everway, I think. When we would see each other, he would give me weekly updates on what had happened, and it was great!  He would even tell me what he was planning and ask what I think about certain situations. We even made a bet if Tom's character would succumb to the wiles of a nubile sword-stress. I said "Of course he will!", while he KNEW that Tom would be stoic and not give in. I won, we'll leave it at that.

Since I had no gaming experience (my older brother played D&D with his friends but a girl could never join!) I didn't have a mind set on how things should be done. However, there were circumstances that the guys could probably tell you about where they all laughed over what I did because it might have been too much like what a D&D player might do. But, since I didn't have the baggage of old games, I like to think that it was easy for me to get into the games we were playing because that was all that I knew. Something else came up once in our conversations, that fact that not once did I present a character to be a romantic link to his, I honestly never considered it. In my first multi-session game, Sorcerer, my character was a woman in her 50's while Paul's was a handsome 30 year old that was sleeping with his clients wife and french kissing his daughter to feed his demon. I trade off being a male or female character and it's totally fun (like Silas).

So, since we have been gaming, one topic of our regular converstation has been gaming. He would ask me about characters and his favorite question is "What is the most interesting thing about (character's name)" After playing that first test of MLwM, we literally spent hours talking about way it turned out so good and some issues I had with the less/more than human characteristics.  I like to think that helped him at least a little.

Paul has many ways to express himself creatively, and I like to think that my playing in the game group dosen't hinder that expression in games.  I would also be totally ok if he needed to join another group to do just that. I like to think that my inclusion in the group is a benefit, for me and the guys.

[Le Joueur]

Another reason is to consider that not all couples like doing every damn thing or activity together. The "joined at the hip" lifestyle is fine, and it's pretty common especially among people in their early 20s. But it's not the only way to conduct a relationship, and the world is full of folks for whom Joe can go bowling with his buddies, or Carol can go to her kickboxing workout classes, without the other one either (a) participating or (b) constantly trying to make the partner stop.

It's conceivable that one doesn't include or encourage one's partner to be involved in role-playing on that basis alone - no need for the "emotional issues" angle to be involved.

I wholeheartedly agree. I never referenced that because for people in this situation, it's not even a question of "is my partner role-playing with me a good idea?" It's a statement: "role-playing is my thing."

I've personally found it to be a great equalizer in relationships where one partner wants more "apart time" than the other. By making your "apart time" into a productive activity, the reticent partner often becomes more open to the concept.

Now we're skating right out onto thin non-game ice here.  Like I'm always telling my egalitarian spouse, there are no relationships of total equality, none.  Some have healthy shifts between who 'has the most' in any given situation, but equality is not an option.  Now if you recognize there will be shifting interests (even with trends and all), you can see that partners will never have exactly the same interest in gaming for any length of time.  "Apart time" is likewise; the equal need for it never lasts long but often gets overlooked.

Still, how does what amounts to purely a partner-relationship issue have to do specifically with gaming?  At the above point, you could pretty much take out the word gaming and put in any other relationship issue.  Sure, it's just as important to not expect your partner to share the intensity of your interest in gaming, but that still has little to do with gaming, itself.

I'm interested if this has anything to do with gaming specifically.  One issue that has taken 'gaming with the partner' out of this realm for us has to do with Ron's "Drawing the Veil" between consenting adults.  Provided a healthy relationship between the partners and with their attitudes towards gaming, they can go pretty far without "Drawing the Veil."  Other than that, I haven't seen anything particularly special about 'partner gaming' that doesn't apply to everything else between the partners.

Fang Langford

p. s. Unless you want to just turn this into a thread about relationships (dumping the "...and gaming" part).

p. p. s. And for the record, we're going on 12 years "joined at the hip."  Our friends think it's sick, but we have plenty of adequate 'release valves,' so it works for us.  (I think they just hate the 'doe eyes.')

[Emily Care]

I am the only one who has a romantic partner who doesn't game?  She expressed interest, but didn't really like it. ...
She also seems to be one of these players who wants to go off an explore their own charachter and not do anything with a unified plot or group. I've wondered that if she was allowed to do that for a while, she'd become more 'group' friendly, but...

Meguey's suggestions about observing what your s.o. likes and working with it seems useful here.

Well, it sounds like your partner enjoys the process of character development, but may need to develop a taste for interacting with world and other characters.  

You might try a narrativist game like Sorcerer where each player is encouraged both to develop their own character's story, and to appreciate what the other players are doing. Her interactions with characters run by the gm could ease her out of self-containment.  

--Emily Care

[Doc Midnight]

My wife to be does not game. I appreciate that. When I try to talk about my games, I get a very nice "Terry, this conversation would probably work out better if you were talking to someone who understood what you were talking about"

That reminds me that I have other friends.

She isn't interested in gaming mostly because she's a bleeding heart pacifist. It made MTG games rather difficult when she'd attack nothing and just criticize the artwork.

I have "involved" gamers in my groups now. Sometimes it's like hanging out with married lawyers. Objectivity can be lost and the next thing you know you're watching a game within a game.

I've seen gamers meet and start dating. Don't even get me started on that one.

Now there is something to be said about the social out look of a gamer who finds a gamer to date. That cool on one hand but an open minded or better yet, an apathetic non gamer is worth their weight in gold.

Doc Midnight

[Walt Freitag]

Here's my thought based on the big issue: why should or should not one attempt to interest one's romantic partner in role-playing?

Well, I certainly can't offer figures with proven statistical significance. But among my married role playing friends (including myself), I've noticed a very distinct pattern. Divorce rate among those whose spouses were role players or became role players during the courtship: zero percent (n=7; mean years married=14). Divorce rate among those who married partners hostile to or uninterested in role playing: fifty percent (n=4), both of the divorces occurring within five years of marriage.

So, if you're talking about a girlfriend/boyfriend of the week (or month, or year) I can't think of any good reason to attempt to interest one's partner in gaming other than needing another player or not wanting to split up on game night. I also can't think of any good reason not to, unless the sex is too good to pass up and you don't want to risk it by revealing your unseemly nerdiness. But if you're talking about a potential life partner, one should attempt to interest him or her in role-playing, because it's a potentially revealing indicator of intellectual compatibility. (Not the only one, of course. In the two 'mixed' role-player non-role-player marriages that have lasted, there are other strong shared intellectual domains, science in one case and the creative pursuit of wealth in the other.)

This goes a little deeper than "the couples who role-play together stay together." It's not an issue of whether you actually end up gaming or not, together or otherwise, now or five or ten or fifteen years from now. It's about sharing (or not sharing) a certain proclivity for imaginative play and a willingness to pursue same outside (especially if you're old enough to be contemplating marriage) of standard social expectations. I can't count how many times my wife and I have participated in some social event and been the oldest people present, or the youngest, or the only straight couple, or the only anglos, or the poorest, or the richest, or the only ones who attended college, or the only ones without advanced degrees. Whether we are currently role playing together or not (which varies from year to year), the fact that we can indicates a degree of compatibility in the way we look at life that makes a lot of other things possible.

- Walt

[lumpley]

As a game designer: Meg sees the first and every subsequent draft of everything I write, game or no.  Hell, she sees every dumb little thing I build out of Legos, like I have to show her all the moving parts and things.  Her involvement has become, over the years, a part of my creative process.  If she'd been put utterly off by puppies, as many people are, the game probably wouldn't exist.

I'm going to generalize that to, as Paul says: having a romantic partner who's involved in and supportive of your creative life, is good.  You can rely on other friends and your community to keep you humble and honest (example: all you all).  Somebody who digs it because you made it, who will point out your worst offenses gently, and who knows what you meant even if you said it badly -- you want that as well.

I think that if we were talking about writing generally, it'd be noncontroversial.  Authors all the time thank their lovers and spouses for "reading innumerable drafts, putting up with me acting like an obsessive poorly-socialized boring person for 12 years, and then typing the damn thing up when I had that breakdown."

As a game player: I think I'm kinda with Scott.  At least, my experience is that when I roleplay, I do this like balancing act with the people I'm playing with -- my relationships with them influence the way I play.  When I'm roleplaying with Meg, my relationship with her has the most weight, and she most influences my play.  Sometimes it's cool, if I'm expressing stuff that's Meg-relationship-friendly; sometimes it's inhibitory.  Same's true, I suppose, any time I'm hanging out with friends including/not including her.

I guess my ideal would be to play a ton, sometimes with Meg and sometimes without.

And I'd generalize that to: roleplaying with a romantic partner is like doing any social thing with a romantic partner, for good and bad.

(Oh, and I want to say that my relationship with Emily is pretty significant itself, and, like waves interfering, sometimes the two coolnesses build each other up and sometimes the inhibition is just overwhelming.  'Slife.)

-Vincent

(He he.  The second half of this post reminds me of writing one of those "I don't want to say too much, because my players might read this" posts, except that I might end up in the doghouse.)

[Doc Midnight]

Vincent,

I think we all agree with the first part of your post. Having the support system for creative endeavors, at home, is a fine thing. The spouse doesn't have to be a gamer to put up with a gamer.

The second part of your post is where issues tend to arise. If one has to alter style of play because of one persona sitting at the table then is that really a thourough gaming experience? I'd have to say not.

If I'm playing a foul mouthed woman hater in a CoC game, I want to be free to take that character to the limits of social good taste while still being a foul mouthed so and so. If my supportive but not entirely understanding wife is in the same game.......

I think role playing is alot like acting in film when it comes to having the signifigant other around. They have to be able to suspend their disbelief enough to allow you to do what you do well.

Doc Midnight

[Meguey]

I'll hazard saying that Vincent's refering more to the "oh, I just landed hard on Meg's *don't put kids in danger merely to pull heartstrings*  issue" sort of altering play based on players. I'm pretty confident that DocMidnight's "foul mouthed woman hater" would be fine (as long as I knew it was a character. I got stuck in the cross-fire once in a game with an *actual* foul-mother woman-hater). I'm all for pushing game limits, but, like other areas of role-play, emotional safty can be respected.

~Meguey

[lumpley]

Hey Doc.

I don't think there's any gaming anywhere where you don't balance and negotiate your relationships with your fellow players.  If you choose not to play a foul-mouthed misogynist in a game because one of the other players will be offended, that's just a choice, it's just you respecting the boundaries of the other player.  Alternately, you could disregard the boundaries and deal with the repercussions on your relationship, and that's just a choice too.  The significance of your relationship with that other player -- wife, in this case -- might figure or might not, that's a choice too.  There isn't a must or mustn't.

When I play with Meg, I mostly don't play characters who are her characters' lovers (nope, Meg, that's not what I was thinking at all).  When I play with Jav, I don't play characters who are anybody's lovers.  When I play with Em, I like to play characters who hang out with hers, lovers or not.  That's the kind of inhibition I'm talking about, and it doesn't make for less thorough roleplaying.  It ..um.. directs my play, it doesn't make it lame.  With one or two awkward exceptions.

I'm confident that your CoC character is just as inhibited by your consideration of your relationships with your fellow players.  That's the big social ape way to do things.

Sometimes, the relationship is both significant and kind of brittle, and the other person is sensitive to things you do "in pretend."  Those people are really hard to game with, you're absolutely right about that.

-Vincent

[Meguey]

Kevin671 said:

See, I am usually too scared to introduce partners into the roleplaying world, for fear that they are going to think that I am a geek [snip] Added to the fact that my main gaming group for my entire high school career was nearly entirely male, and when a female player did become involved I suppose the fact that all the other players were guys probably drove them away. It might've not been so bad, if there were more female gamers out there, so that a newer female gamer might be a little less intimidated to come to the table. I truely envy those of you who are able to blend the two worlds effectively.

Two things: first, the fear o' geekdom factor. I wish more folks would own up to roleplaying. Yes, sometimes we get supergeeky about last session, but overall, I've found gamers to be more creative, more widely read, more articulate, more able imagine themselves in another's position and more interesting than non-gamers. Maybe I'm just lucky.

Second point: if there is a desire to have female gamers of any age, ya gotta start 'em young. I think 6 or 7 is good, because they're still kids, still totally into 'pretend'.  Also, up to high school girls generally are into the idea of theater and drama - lots of women I know came to gaming by way of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Ren faires or LARP-type stuff. Then we jump over to later posts on this thread by Doc Midnight, Vincent, and myself about respecting player's sensibilities: if you're a gang of high school boys playing Babes in Chainmail Bikinis & Wonkin' Great Magic Swords, chances are reasonable you're not going to have girls knocking down the door to get in the game. On the other hand, one of the few saving graces of WWs Noun:the Gerund games was tremendous gender cross-over.  Play a supercool vampire chick or a bitchin' werwolf girl? Count my female high school (previously) non-gamer friends in!  


Ron said:

Here's my thought based on the big issue: why should or should not one attempt to interest one's romantic partner in role-playing?

Well, I think the pros are fairly self-evident: sharing things with your partner is cool, avoiding the guilt tripping that folks have mentioned is good, and getting support for your creative efforts rocks. The cons have been touched on: fear of being seen as a geek loser, wanting space for your own interests, having circles of friends that don't perfectly overlap.

I think at base, it's about feeling support from our partners in what has meaning to us. We could, as Ron pointed out, be talking about sail-boating or stamp-collecting. Someone mentioned valuing their partner's perspective as a nongamer; that's great, and it still counts as support for what has meaning. I design quilts like Vincent designs games - constantly, usually with several in various stages already. He's not a quilter to nearly the degree that I'm a gamer, but he's designed a few, is happy to lend an eye, rarely gripes about the shelf space or money involved, and is awed by my mastery of the craft -- same as me with his games.

There's another bit to that, about the difference between tolerance, acceptance, and support of our partner's quirks, be they gaming or what-have-you. The three get confused, fairly often I think. To me, one tolerates something distasteful because of contractual relationship agreements. One accepts something at a neutral state, no real engagement either way. One supports something they see brings joy and has worth, even if only to the other, even if one can see no reason on this earth or any other why the other should care so much about a made-up character.  Given the choice, I think we'd all choose to be supported, and probably not just by one person, hence our dearly beloved gaming groups and other friends.


Hi, Clinton. You said:

Many people play role-playing games to deal with personal issues. If you're dealing with personal issues in the context of role-playing, your partner is the last person that needs to be there.

I agree totally with the first sentence, and quibble with the second. Our recent Ars Magica cycle has been all about how we interact with our fathers.  Some of this has been conscious, some has risen out of play, but it's been really interesting to see where it goes in affecting non-game thought.  I suspect that many more people use role-playing games to deal with personal issues than are ever aware that they are.  I mean, my almost-six year old is *constantly* fightly dragons in the backyard. I know enough about childhood development to know what he's doing: externalizing inner struggles and dealing with them in a creative, non-self-damaging way.

That's a lot of gaming in a nutshell, if you ask me. Why do we want to play people solidly in controll? Why do we want to try on being totally helpless? Or cross-gender? Or heartlessly cruel? Or drug-addicted? Because we're doing the same thing as my son, only we want more structure to hold it all. And, for some of us, we're awake enough to notice that, and to actively use gaming as an outlet, hence my current vicious Otherkind character, venting my frusterations with said son in a safe, non-self-damaging way.

~Meguey

[Doc Midnight]

Hey Doc.

I don't think there's any gaming anywhere where you don't balance and negotiate your relationships with your fellow players.  

I think this happens more in the getting to know your group phase. My group has been together for five years now. By this point we've gotten beyond stepping lightly around each others idiosyncracies and politics.

If you choose not to play a foul-mouthed misogynist in a game because one of the other players will be offended, that's just a choice, it's just you respecting the boundaries of the other player.  

But that doesn't happen in my group. What does happen is that we have a guy who almost fits that description and he doesn't stry far from it in the characters he plays either. When we switch games, other player will take that role on so he can see it from the outside and it's helped his play.

Alternately, you could disregard the boundaries and deal with the repercussions on your relationship, and that's just a choice too.  The significance of your relationship with that other player -- wife, in this case -- might figure or might not, that's a choice too.  There isn't a must or mustn't.

We don't put each other in positions wher we have to make those types of choices. We play games and allow each other the space to play whatever types of characters we need to. I'm speaking of my fellow players here, not my wife to be, who isn't nearly involved enough to understand.

I'm confident that your CoC character is just as inhibited by your consideration of your relationships with your fellow players.  That's the big social ape way to do things.

Some games are really just moving fodder around on a board. Relationships are made and broken in game. My characters aren't inhibited by my consideration for my other players unless they are either young, or new to being around me, or in laws.


Doc Midnight