Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
You want her to dive?
Just threaten to take away her vacum cleaner...and tell her she won't get the new Kenwood Magi-mixer that she was dreaming of getting for Christmas.
Well, thanks all for the replies!
I thought it would be a light and airy topic and some of you responded that way.
The spectrum of replies are really interesting.....they vary from humor to "how dare you you chauvinist pig" to the usual "how can you put your wife, children, and the whole dive boat at risk" talk.
Just to make things a little clearer; after 24 years of happy marriage, I adore my wife. I cannot and would not try to force her to do anything she does not want to do.
But how to "encourage" her to ENTHUSIASTICALLY SERIOUSLY WANT to?
Good question. I think most of us understood the positive tone of your original message - you are doing something you love to do, and want to share that experience with your spouse. There are many stories of oftren convoluted paths that lead to couples diving together. And, it can take a long time in some cases. I have been diving for 9 years, and two of our four children are certified, while a third is a 'work in progress' (academics and confined water done), but my wife has consistently said, 'Thanks, but I am not interested.' She has been going to scuba club meetings / parties with me for years, and she has been to Bonaire twice and Roatan once with me on club trips, and enjoyed the excursions as vacations, usually going as the only non-diver (and non-snorkler) in a group of ~20. We got back from the most recent Bonaire trip Saturday, during which she was 'encouraged' throughout the week, primarily by other women divers in the group, to learn to dive, with her continuing to politely say, 'No, thanks.' I was therefore amazed yesterday morning to have her tell me that she wants to get certified! In talking about her apparent change of heart, she said one of the biggest drawbacks to diving for her was the amount of time she sees people (me included) going through to get ready to dive, AND cleaning / packing up after a dive. But, she said that she sees the same thing when we ride our horses - all the time spent in 'retrieving' the horse from the pasture, cleaning hooves, tacking up, then replicating the process after a ride, etc, etc. - yet she still enjoys riding. Once she looked at it that way, she decided that maybe she was letting the perceived inconvenience get in the way of doing something enjoyable. She also sees diving as a social activity to be pursued with a number of other people - not just me - and I think that helped. She knows a lot of people in the club and it is a socially compatitible group that shes enjoys spending time with. We will see how the certification process goes.
