Terrible Advice Tuesdays: The Full-Proof Way For Spousal Tank Acceptance?
Terrible Advice Tuesdays: If your spouse/partner is against you having a saltwater tank, just wait till he/she is gone and then set it up! There’s no turning back at that point!
The rest of the story: This could be terrible advice or not, depending on how much your spouse is prone to emotional outbursts or erratic behavior! Certainly I recommend talking about it first.
On the other hand, this method could work well if your spouse/significant other is immediately taken by the beauty of your tank.
(Note: I got this advice from a guy who did just that. He waited until his wife was gone, then drilled 4″ holes in the hardwood floor for steel tank supports. Talk about gutsy move! And yes, he is still married.)
Browse the Store! Questions?
Just to be safe, should you choose this route, remove all firearms and most sharp objects from the house!
On the serious side; I got back into the hobby after retiring and went in with both feet, full bore, like many do. One major key to long term success in blending this hobby into a relationship, is to attain and keep a balance. Many of us have heard “You care more about those tanks than you do me” I’d venture! After cutting back to a sustainable level (one where it became more a serious hobby, vs a mistress she was competing with), we achieved that balance. She now loves the tanks and inhabitants as much as I (and even more so with most of the livestock) and every birthday and Christmas, I can expect either a gift certificate from one of my favorite suppliers or, after checking with me to make sure, some new addition for one of the tanks (pair of coral banded shrimp this month!). I never thought I would see this, a couple of years ago!
EX wife gave me the okay for the tank but one day she went out and I needed to put my auto top Off in The other room so I drilled a small hole through the wall for the ATO ran the hose and when she found out she was pissed but got over it… she’s my EX not do to the tank. Lol.
I was successful in getting my significant other to allow me, even a little excited, to have a reef tank by bringing her to a fish store. We were at petco when they had their 1gal/$1 sale, so I picked up a 40 breeder and then we went to a lfs and I let her pick if we would have a planted fw or a reef tank. She picked reef tank. 🙂 She does get excited about getting fish, but I think she is regretting it, because of how much money I have spent and how much work I do on it.
I also am going to add, she loves shopping for fish and coral. I think she just loves to shop.
Nick L..brilliant! “Honey, you love to shop, let’s go drop hundreds of dollars right NOW!” Let me know her reaction when you pull up to the local fish store!
ive done this with my most recent nano reef. my wife was not to pleased.
definitely risky with a nano tank Jason…she could easily remove it!
My wife wasnt to pleased when I spent $1000au on my 100 gal secondhand setup. Couldnt believe I spent that much on what at the time looked like a dead stagnat eyesore. Now 9 months on it is a beatiful coral/ fish setup that she maintains whilst I work 1000kms away for 4 weeks put of every 5. She loves it just as much as me but wont admit it.
Dennis of west australia
I would definitely discuss the hobby with your sig. other. If you choose to create a separate vacation for both of you and as she is enjoying a lovely week in her vacation spot of choice, and you choose to start reefing as a hobby, you might want to consider taking out a policy on your homeowners insurance. She just might want to take up carpentry once she returns home. Her favorite tool would be a hammer. ( NO I don’t mean Euphyilla Parancora…. Common Name: Hammer Coral). Glass and hammers don’t mix. Now you know the rest of the story.
I guess this advice would be fine if you are prepared for your significant other to leave. If my wife had told me “no”, I wouldn’t have a reef tank. Sorry, I am not willing to throw away 20 years of marriage for a hobby. That being said I am so happy that she said yes.
I am in the happy position of being divorced and so can do what the hell I want,
Just set up a 4 foot x 4 foot x 22 inch deep tank in the MIDDLE of my room and I am not getting any grief from anyone about it , ha
Easy one. Get your kids hooked to it as well and there’s no way the spouse going to fight the battle against everyone… Can’t lose right?
Realistically, if most are as passionate about the hobby as myself, your spouse should be happy accept your obsession, although they might be your restraint from filling the house with tanks. I wouldn’t want to have the choose between the 2, but my life would be much less fulfilling without either.
My wife has grown to love the reef tank as much as I. Well almost anyways.. I am going to build my own 200 gallon tank so as a practice run I built her a scaled down version, 40 gallons so that the 200g was not my first ever tank built from scratch. She loves all the odd creatures. Many sea slugs, sea hare, sand dollars, various starfish etc.. if its weird she will buy it for her tank as long as I make certain we can feed it. She also spends hours looking in our big tank and constantly finds new creatures appearing out of the rock.
Now we have his and hers reef tanks. I care for them all but she spends more at the LFS than I do!
I have mine set up at work. We spend a large percent of our awake hours there anyways, plus it helps make the job more bearable.
The best way i found that worked was to get my kids involved, she loved the idea of that ,and she loves the way the tank looks in the house.
I tested this theory about two months ago. My girlfriend specifically forbade me from setting up a second tank in our very small apartment, so I did it while she was at work. She came home to a new 29 bio-cube right next to our bedroom door. She is still a little upset about it, but I think she’ll come around a little more with every colorful coral or fish added.
In ’77, my wife and I drove down from Holland to Saudi Arabia for my job. We met someone there who had a salt water tank and I wanted to do the same. Problem was it was the ultimate DIY hobby.
To start, I had to convince my wife to learn how to scuba dive so we could collect fish together in both the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea. If you think keeping a tank is a challenge, try catching them and transporting across Arabia in August. We had a wonderful time in the hobby until the 1st Gulf War ended it.
Bottom line, try to engage your significant other in the hobby a bit at a time. And, make sure it compliments your spouses decor ideas.
when i see that situation at the store. usually a husband all giddy at the tanks and a wife with a grocrey cart & kids just standing there glazed. i usually mention to the wife that there is alot worse addictions. most times a get a smile or giggle and hubby always gets a new fish!
Steve from England, that is awesome! I’m so jealous! hahaha! Cheers!
Wanna know what works better find 6 fish you know you want in your setup let her pick from them. Also keep the damn skimmer clean women have better noses than men and there is nothing worse than skimmer stink. Works awesome when you let her pick corals too. Trust me my husband started the tank sneaky man won me over to the dark side lol.
Ahhh yes, the old ‘get the wife to go along with it trick’. I’m retired but still work to support the ‘Reef Habbit’. My wife actually went along from day one. We always had fresh-water tanks so making the switch was pretty easy with her. I just never bothered to tell her how much the stuff cost. As long as I keep it under wraps we will be fine.LOL. I think a pretty good question to ask is ‘Just what in the world possesses us to fall in love with this hobby so much’. I recently up-graded to a 120g mixed reef and I already have plans for a future upgrade to 300g in-wall. That may be when I will have to do some serious persuading.
My wife went to work one day, when she came back there was a 60gal cube in my office. Two years later, she went to work and there was 180gal tank next to it. I work out of my house so it is the perfect setup for me. The last bi-weekly water change was the tipping point for her, not sure why garbage cans full of RO water in the bedroom bothers her so much?…. We agreed that I could move my tanks and office into the basement so she would not be so stressed out. I mentioned 1200 gals, now that I have a bigger office but I am not sure she heard me..
Trigger words and phrases that can get an instant negative reaction from my lovely wife: refugium, aquascaping, water change, check out this new urchin, grape caulerpa, sorry, working on my tank this weekend, my tank just sent me an email,you spend more time with your tanks then me.. and… who is Mr Saltwater tank and why is he sending you emails.
Lets be clear, she has her faults! So whenever she gets under my skin I whip out the iphone and ask her if she wants to see a live stream of my tanks.
On vacation in the Keys last summer with my 9yr son. We walked through a small aquarium and he educated mom on all the corals and inverts that were there. She asked him how he knew all this and said, “dad has most of that stuff in his office”… See it’s educational she can’t argue with that.
I think it’s great when you can enjoy this amazing hobby with your sig. Other. My girlfriend of almost two years, has grown to love this hobby, and I can honestly say that it’s brought us closer together. We even set up a small 10 gallon reef in her room. I wish I could say the same about her biggest interest (Make-up) but I couldn’t picture my self with a face covered in sephora products, lol.
I look forward to having additional points of interest to spend with my wife, not away or against her. If a reef aquarium doesn’t add to our marriage in some way, I’ll be choosing her first and last, hands down.
However, being able to care for others hobby through business does alleviate some distress if I wouldn’t be allowed to own one.
Took about a year of hinting to my wife that I want to get back into the hobby after being out of it for about 10 years for her to one day say to me.”let’s go get the stuff to get your tank up and running”. God I love her!!! She gave me the go ahead on something that I love and in return, I gave her a brand new kitchen. Funny thing is, when we take our monthly trips out to the LFS, she always picks out more corals than I do…lol. I now have a 55gal zoa and fish, a 29bio sps/softie, and a 14bio set up. Latest thing she said is, ” we should get a 90 for the dining room”. If I was to have set up a tank while she was away, I would probably now have none. When she is happy, life is easy!
I have spent over $2800 in the last week on my new tank. Wife is wondering what the hell happened to our tax refund..The tank isn’t here yet and the $2800 is just the beginning. I still have $400 left to pay off when the tank arrives. Not to mention the odds and ends PVC, water, new rock, coral, fish, sand. She will want a divorce when she see’s the actual cost of tank. I have an ace in my pocket…My Kids love the tank. And they want a bigger one. so the added cost is our kids fault. I had nothing to do with it.
Mark, she actually judges the lfs based on if they have dead fish in their tanks. We went to a few iffy stores and one had dead fish. I agree, I know it happens, but to not clean them out. Long story short, the lfs employee tried selling me a pair of pencil wrasses, when he went to show them to me, one was dead, and not like it just died, like it’s been dead over night and this was a few hours after they open.
Her reaction is about the same as when she finds a nice outfit, so that is good, she is way more into the fish than corals. So, when she sees me drop a couple hundred on some sps frags, I don’t know what will happen.
My husband and I own our own business and we work from home and strangely we keep separate checking accounts so he has no idea how much money I have spent (and continue to spend) on my tank. He only gives a slight glance at my tank (which I put as a room divider between the formal living and dining room). When people come to the front door the tank is the first thing they see and always get an excited comment about what a nice fish tank we have. He made a comment about that the other day and I think he is secretly proud of the tank. I just wish he was as in to it as I am because I have to do all the work on it. But I love it!
I was lucky. My wife asked her father for a tank for Christmas, then handed the maintenance and livestock selection to me. 🙂
In our house exists a room at the end of a long hallway that I was allowed to set up a 55 fw tank originally, then a 40 came along in the shape of a fowlr with a sump as a basic entry level to the marine side of things. Then when corals came into the picture the female in my life got a little annoyed at the money & time being spent in this man cave with a TV. So when she was visiting family for 2 weeks I got busy with a build of 5 tanks, wooden stand sump & all plumbing which I’d planned months in advance. Even though it was for breeding mouth brooding Cichlids it was done to pay for my new addiction. When she got home she couldn’t believe all that had been achieved in the time.” How did the tanks cost then” was the next question. Just the cost of glass & silicone was my answer.
Well even though she was not pleased over the next 5 years or so the room was filled with 14 tanks eventually & the coral tank was a 220gal set-up all paid for with the part-time maintenance business I’d started plus my wholesales fish business of more than 50 species of Cichlids over that period. Now my marine coral set-up worth more than $12k is the result, and the female in my world likes the variety of fish & each new brood of colourful African fish, and the 40 or so corals. The breeding tanks are gone now having paid for what I needed and without realising it she’d allowed me a tank room with a big screen TV all as a result of a 2 week trip to see her sister.