The Long and Winding Road

One thing the entire Remap staff have in common is they've all in longterm relationships with their partners. For Rob and Patrick specifically, that means relationships that are entering into their second (!!) decades. Relationships change over time, but they also have a habit of condensing, as people come to understand one another more deeply, and more and more of their lives overlap.

Some habits and hobbies overlap, while others...look, it's okay to have YOU time. But what defines YOU time, and how does it change over the years? And as you better define who you are and how each of you slot into the relationship, doesn't it become harder and harder to carve out time to develop your own interests?

And somehow, this conversation all starts because of Silent Hill 2...

Patrick: I couldn’t help but laugh during a moment on last week’s podcast where, after excitedly accepting my offer of a download code to play Silent Hill 2 on your PlayStation 5, you ended up not spending any time with the game before your partner declared it was not a spooky evening.

My wife, on the other hand, looked at me booting up Silent Hill 2 and went “thank god, I can go to bed early.” If she can find an excuse to be in bed before 10pm, she’ll take it. Despite our shared love of horror, it does not really extend to watching me beat the crap out of flesh blobs and trying to figure out what arcane pieces are needed to progress past a jukebox puzzle.

What it got me thinking about was something we don’t have in common: partners who are into video games. My wife has never had a problem with my career or the amount of time that I spend playing video games, free time or not. This is a woman who, prior to me getting seriously into football and arguably becoming a bigger nerd of it these days, would spend Sundays at the bar down the street, cheering with strangers, while I tracked down another side quest in Fallout 3. Our worlds eventually overlapped on sports, but games have never quite clicked with her.

There have been a few exceptions and both involve, perhaps not shockingly, zombies. 

When Left 4 Dead 2 came out, she was entranced by the pitch. This was an era where games still supported split-screen, so we booted it up on Xbox 360, and gave the game a few rounds. A first-person-shooter is a tough genre to dive into when you haven’t really played a video game since high school, and the moment that ultimately broke everything was realizing climbing a ladder meant looking up and moving forward. It was too much. Years later, when the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead was a phenomenon, we’d play that game side-by-side, with my wife calling the shots on the decisions. It was so fun that we ended up playing a few different Telltale games that way, too, before falling off them the way the rest of the world eventually did. 

Generally speaking, my habits overlap with my wife’s. I love sports but she, at least, loves football, and has no problem spending all afternoon with the neighbors, beers in hand, watching the games roll on. (But I will say her interest drops sharply when the Chicago Bears are done, win or lose.) Our tastes on movies, television, and especially horror are on the same page, as well, which means there’s rarely any real debate over what we’re watching on a given night.

I like that. I love that we have many genuine reasons to spend time with one another, where the rare “free time” we get from the kids isn’t also fighting for our personal interests. There have been times in my life where I see photos of couples with two TVs lined up next to each other, as they dig into a game side-by-side, but I actually sorta like that video games are my thing? 

Maybe I’d feel differently if she suddenly got into them, too, but it is nice to have your own thing.

My mind started off with video games, but I suppose this dynamic applies to all sorts of hobbies.

Rob: The longer MK and I have been together the more overlap there is. It might just be that as stuff like grad school and the challenges of our earlier careers recede, there’s simply more time and it’s easiest to fill it with stuff that’s already right in front of her because I’m so into it already. Or maybe we were uncannily well-matched from the start, we just wouldn’t fully realize it until a decade or so had passed. But sports went from my thing to our thing. Games were always her thing, but she got into them way more once I was working as a games critic. But the exact things she likes are different than the things I like. Her relationship to these hobbies is always distinct from mine.

I’ll give you an example. We both adore the Mercedes coupe I bought last year. It’s the greatest car we’ve ever owned, a sleekly luxurious highway cruiser. Like a lot of luxury touring cars, the E450 has different drive modes but the major ones are Comfort and Sport. I like Comfort a lot: it’s still a responsive and agile car, but it’s also got this incredibly smooth and quiet ride that honestly makes it one of the most comfortable places I spend time. Seriously, there are times I hit stop-and-go traffic that adds 45 minutes to my drive home and I honestly feel more relaxed because it’s like a spa day got extended.

In Sport mode, the priority is on handling and responsiveness. The sensitivity of the controls goes up sharply, and the suspension firms up so you can really feel the road. It’s twitchy and kind of harsh but it gives you quick access to pretty much all the clubs the car has in its bag. It’s… kind of unpleasant, if you ask me. But MK loves it. It’s turned highway ramps into her absolute favorite bits of road when traffic is light, because you can get a taste of what the car can do without actually going too fast. Where I love the Mercedes’ poise and comfort, she loves its eagerness and power. As she often says, there is no law about how quickly you get up to the speed limit.

A few weeks ago, she came back from having the car detailed and told me that while she was killing time and looking for something to do, she realized there was a karting track nearby. There was nobody there, so she got to go set laps by herself and absolutely loved it. She ran laps until her head was about to fall off her shoulders. She came back from that thinking she might want us to get a “track day” car someday, where it’s comfortable to drive on city streets but can absolutely carve up race courses. Think of stuff like the Mazda Miata / MX-5, the Chevy Corvette, or an M-model BMW and you get the idea.

Now I love racing and I love cars but this is not something I’ve ever felt a strong pull to do. Would I like to take a nice car onto a track? Absolutely. But would I go to the trouble of making that happen? Probably not. But my interest in racing and cars led to her having this moment of realization about how compelling driving can be.