Odd Couples : Opera versus hockey. Gourmet cooking versus cycling. It’s OK if togetherness is not blissyou can hate your mate’s hobbies and still be happy together.
If a dating service tried to pair them up according to hobbies and tastes, its computer would probably spit these two in opposite directions.
Craig and Marisa share a new marriage and a professionlawbut they have this leisure-taste problem:
Most evenings, you’ll find Craig at the symphony listening to Mahler, or at the opera with Puccini. When relaxing at home, he’s in his den listening to more classics and reading German textbooks. The thrill of pop culture eludes him.
Marisa, meanwhile, is seen about town at hockey games or at her boxing class. At home, she watches “Melrose Place” and talks to her friends on the phone. Her musical tastes point more toward Prince.
A recipe for disaster? Hardly.
They have learned an important secret: Married couples can hate each other’s hobbies and still live happily ever after.
The key, experts agree, is to put a little breathing space between you and your partner and each pursue what you enjoy, even if you have to do it on your ownan idea traditionalists often find baroque.
“Society has long said the couple’s raison d’etre is to be togetherat all costs,” says Dr. Robert Gorney, professor of psychiatry at UCLA and director of the program on psychological adaptation and the future.
“We want matching on all levels, sort of the glue to help us stick together. But more often than not, it doesn’t work out. And then people get cranky. They think, ‘I’m stuck together with someone who hates what I love. What now?’ ”
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With stress so high these days, leisure time becomes even more cherished. Feeling obligated to spend every weekend or vacation doing something one partner hates produces resentmentthe opposite of fun.
“People can often learn to harmonize in the work of raising kids, paying bills, in the humdrum workaday life,” Gorney says. “But when fun enters in, people often have very separate ideas of what that is. One thing is certain, forcing fun rarely works.”
This is the mutual-torture idea: She goes with him and suffers through a Chuck Norris movie just so next week he’ll be bored and dazed with her at “The Scent of Green Papaya.”
“This kind of thing went on for about a year,” says Marla Dihold, a Burbank nurse. “I’d do what he wanted and then (husband Max) would do what I wanted and then I’d do what he wanted, and around we’d go.
“And, yeah, I was getting resentful, and so was he. I’d come home from a disastrous night slam-dancing thinking, ‘This is definitely not the cruise I signed up for.’ ”
For them, the break came serendipitously. He was offered a vacation through work and went to Canada for three weeks with-out her. They realized that (a) they could survive apart, and that (b) they actually enjoyed it. And they still loved each other lots.
“Some people have a high need for intimacy and closeness and others have more of a need for their ‘space,’ ” says Shellee Friedland, a counselor in private practice in Irvine.
And it’s when a space type and an intimacy type join up that recreational activities can turn toxic. Successful couples learn to negotiate these needs, Friedland says, and not see the differences as threatening. She believes people get the concept of love and rejection mixed up with “Will he come with me to my tennis match?”
Dihold would imagine her spouse at a concert, solo, cursing the fact he ended up with a mate who hated his passion for rock ‘n’ roll.
“I felt very guilty, like I was being selfish,” she says, though nurturing her rose garden is far more her style. Now they both prosper from the time apart.
Malibu residents Dusty and Denise Peak, married 15 years, confirm the benefit of recreational space.
A hard-core surfer and karate black belt, Dusty’s out daily at dawn riding the waves with his buddies. Denise, an artist, tried karate (for him, she says) but soon realized it was not her thing. Her mana runs more to reading, painting and attending art lectures at the Getty, something Dusty says would leave him unconscious.
She adds: “We’ve belonged to the same gym for five years but do you think we’ve ever worked out together? We did once, but spent most of the time shuffling the kids back and forth.”
Now they pursue the gymand most hobbieson their own, and don’t try to convert each other.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that in the end you must create your own happiness,” Denise says. “I can’t expect someone elseeven my husbandto live up to my expectations and satisfy all my needs. And that takes commitment and space.”
Space. If you want to hear a nice word battered into pejorative status, try using space and suggesting marriage partners take separate vacations.
Larry Johnson remembers when he decided to go to Africa, alone. “My sister asked me point blank if this was a prelude to a separation and divorce, if I was edging my way out,” says Johnson, married 30 years. “I just laughed.”
His wife, Judith, a Pasadena attorney, says they both still get inquiries about fidelity. “I just want to go to Africa and Judith would be miserable. That’s it.”
For Marion Wilsona gourmet cook and thoroughbred racing fanone mountain-biking vacation with her new husband was more than enough.
“The fascination with my husband’s biking vanished. He delighted in this queer, folksy Texas talk, especially when other guys were around. And it drove me crazy.
“I remember one evening we sat around eating chili out of a caneating out of the same can mind youand no one would talk, and then every 15 minutes we’d discuss exercise and lower back pain or how Japanese management techniques could be applied to the Mets. I ran home screaming to myself: ‘Not for me! Never again!’ ”
In their 22-year marriage they’ve taken just one other vacation together, and that was to his mother’s in Omaha. “Other than our vacation styles, we get along like two peas in a pod.”
Not surprisingly, the twenty-something generation has welcomed this attitude with gusto.
“I know a lot of couples my age who take for granted that they’re going to spend time apart doing what they enjoy,” says Sarah Hutchinson, 26, of Venice.
She and her boyfriend both reject the idea that one member of the couple should “sacrifice” enjoyment for the pleasure of the other. “I guess kids my age figure, ‘Who needs another guilt trip?’ ”
“If you want to be loved, love and be lovable,” wrote Ben Franklin. Part of that is loving our partners enough to let them be themselves and letting go of the need to control how that’s going to happen.
“It may be with you or may be without you, but the choice to let it happen without grudge is the key,” UCLA’s Gorney says. “After all, the issue here is not whether we have to harmonize on every level, but how far are we willing to try.”
The ideal adaptation?
“Where both partners agree to be different, yet fully loving and agree not to feel guilty about doing things separately,” he says. “What could be better?”