Hello all - I am the "buddy" referred to in the original post, aka "wife". Scubasteve needed me to check his email and must have forgotten that he made me look like a psycho. I would like to say thank you to all the people who recommended he talk to me and to the ones that said to ditch the wife, well...I suppose it's better for you to be alone seeing that your a-holes. We apparently lack communication skills and/or he's just a jerk wanting a divorce. The one and only time I have ever grabbed him was during a descent with a very low visibility. I grabbed his arm while he was facing me only to be shoved away repeatedly at which point my brother in law took my hand. After a few secs I recovered from my sudden onset of vertigo. Yes, we are new divers but his representation of the actual events are skewed at best. He complains when I don't follow him explicitly and complains if I give him too much attention. It would appear I am in a pickle. I love to dive but every diver I know won't dive with a married woman and my husband apparently has the startle reflex of a newborn. I give up. The only reason I even started diving was for him and his whim but now I am hooked. I think I will just have to join a dive group even though I prefer solo diving. Sorry, it just really hurt me to know that instead of talking to me about this he decided it was much more appropriate to post on the web. Sweet. Sincerely scubasteves soon to be ex
I am SO trying not to laugh...I really am. I completely empathize with you, which is why I'm trying desperately not to laugh, but your post is just so damn funny...especially to someone who's been married for 25 years and has dealt with a lot of the same issues (but I'm still here!
). I just have to applaud your great attitude and ability to find the humor in the situation. Good for you.
Now, as to what to do...many of us married couples who went through OW together have had to *learn* how to be buddies. There is so much more involved in trying to buddy with your spouse - so much baggage that doesn't exist when buddying with friends.
Like you, hubby is the one who got me into it...I did it initially for him, not thinking that I'd like it all that much...and I'M the one who fell totally in love with it. It took us a long time to get to the point where we could comfortably buddy together. Part of that was because I became WAY more passionate about it than him, and so I joined some local dive groups and started diving LOTS more than him, and ended up buddying and being mentored by many experienced divers. My skills surpassed his pretty quickly, and then we ended up in a power struggle - I didn't want him to lead the dive, but he wasn't comfortable with ME leading the dive...and that's just one small aspect of the issues we had to work out. There were many others.
Ultimately we decided we WANTED to work them out...and we did, through much trial and error and LOTS of diving, including many "skills & drills" dives - dives we did not for fun, but for the sole purpose of improving our buddy skills. Now, four years later, he is my favorite dive buddy. We're a team: we know each other's gear, practices, habits, hand signals, comfort level. We can speak to each other underwater just with a look. We can anticipate each others' moves. I know his SAC rate (he ALWAYS sucks it down way faster than me!
), and I know at what point he's going to give me the "I'm cold, let's head back to the boat" look. I know where he likes to hang in the water column - I don't have to constantly be searching for him. I tend to lead the dives these days (mainly because I have a camera and I'm looking for things to shoot) and he looks around for the bigger stuff, and he will get my attention away from staring at the little stuff on the reefs if something cool is out there.
I also know that he knows what to do if something goes wrong, and he knows the same about me. I trust him completely...and I sure couldn't say that in the early months of our diving together!
None of this came easily. We worked at it, and spent many hours diving together to get here. But it was WORTH it.
You're very new, and very much at the beginning of this process. Give it time...and lots of dives. Make plans to do skills & drills dives where you plan in advance what you are going to do - work on your navigation, or practice sharing air, or work on your buoyancy. I know it can feel like "wasting" dives, especially if you have to pay to go on a dive boat (we had the luxury of doing beach dives for the cost of just an air fill and the gas to get there)...be sure to plan some fun dives as well, where you use the skills you've been working on. But in the end you'll have the best buddy.
Now if we could just work out our issues as well ABOVE water!
(Sounds like you got some of that to do too....:cool2
