Non-Fiction Writing Contest Submission by BGNoyce
Looking at various survival blogs and forums I’ve seen the question many times similar to, “my wife is resistant to the ideas of preparation and survivalism. How can I get her on board?” The advice usually consists of, “leave her, she’s stupid. I hope she gets eaten by zombies!”
Chances are, if your asking this question though, it is you who are coming to a new perspective, and it’s probably not fair to expect your significant other to completely change over night or to even do anything more than to eventually accept and respect that this is something important to you.
Here is some advice on how to, if not bring your significant other on board, at least allow them to not be threatened by your new perspective.
1. Don’t be a crazy person. Yes, it is very clear to you that the latest news report about cute zoo panda’s failure to copulate is a sign of the coming end times, but your significant other may think it’s just a cute story.
Seriously though, don’t put everything you read and see into the context of the end of times, even if it really is ominous signs. Your preparing for an uncertain future, the second you start to claim foreknowledge your family starts to worry, especially with all those guns.
2. Don’t be a gun nut. Or at least don’t appear to be a gun nut. Personally, I can’t imagine not having a fully loaded AK in the closet, but if you and your spouse have never had a gun in the house, and suddenly you come home with an assault rifle 3 pistols and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, it might make them a bit uncomfortable.
If your wife is concerned about having a firearm in the house, its important for her to understand this isn’t a knee jerk reaction. Take some NRA classes before you even buy a gun, many basic gun courses provide the firearms, and some ranges rent firearms for use on the range. Do this even if you have previous experience with guns.
Show her you’re going to be responsible, and that you understand the real risks involved. When you get the gun, don’t spend the extra money on a laser and custom grips and high performance special forces trigger job, spend some money on some good safety gear, such as a lockbox for your pistol.
As a husband I feel my family’s safety is my moral responsibility. I feel it is not just my right to own a gun but my responsibility. But you should understand, that, you didn’t have one before, so she is going to be a little unsure of why you feel you need one now.
The media tells her constantly that guns are the reason bad things happen. Eventually you may need to just bring a gun home, but do everything first to help her understand that you are going to be a responsible gun owner, and that the gun has nothing to do with your ego.
3. Start small. Most people can see the logic of a couple of cases of water in the closet. An evacuation bag in case of an emergency is also a pretty easy sell. The truth is, not having an emergency kit in the car actually borders on neurotic behavior.
How many people die in their cars just barely outside of civilization because they don’t have a simple survival kit in the car, or even some water in the trunk? AAA wont do you any good if your cell phone is down or you forgot it.
4. Use your stuff sometimes. A lot of survival doctrine states never to use your supplies until your rotating them out, there is good logic to this, but I would encourage you to sometimes allow an early rotation of an item if your significant other needs it.
When they need something and you say, oh, hold on I have one in the evacuation bag, it may help change their attitude about preparations on an all most subconscious level. Also, using your stuff helps you realize where flaws might be.
5. Don’t be a bummer. Try and laugh at yourself. If your significant other is teasing you about your survivalism, they may be starting to feel comfortable with it as an aspect of you. If you respond by slamming your fist on the table and yelling, “you wont be laughing when the big one comes!” it may be counter productive.
6. Don’t spend all the money. If money is tight, especially, be frugal with your preps. Try to find inexpensive solutions, find ways to re-purpose things you already have, look for used items at yard sales and whatnot. Don’t say, “I didn’t pay the cable bill because I found a great deal of freeze-dried chocolate bars.
You should be reading survival manuals instead of watching tv anyway.” Don’t get too worked up thinking that it’s happening tomorrow. We all feel like that sometimes, and while it’s true, that it might all come crashing down tomorrow, it probably wont. Keep working on your preps, as your resources allow, steadily working survivalism into your life.
7. Look for survival related hobbies. Let’s face it, sitting around thinking about how you can eek out a horrible existence in a post apocalyptic world may not sound as fun to your wife as it does to you. The good news is, many of the aspects of survivalism may be interesting to your significant other if removed from the context of preparing for a dark and depressing future.
Activities like camping, and hiking are very appealing to many people, and you don’t have to turn it into a simulated melt-down to get some good training out of it. A big family camp-out can be great for testing out gear, organizing, figuring out how much water you use, what camping food and recipes family members enjoy, and extra items that should be included for family members in emergency bags.
It is also a great opportunity to justify some extra survival gear, because it will be camping gear. Even if your family doesn’t ever begin to accept the possibility of a major collapse, if it does happen, your family will be more equipped psychologically for roughing it if you’ve spent a lot of time camping.
If you always keep your camping equipment ready to go you have the basis of a survival kit. Even a day hike helps you learn to organize bags, and answers some questions about how much family members are comfortable carrying, how far and fast are they comfortable walking and whatnot.
If you can get your wife into a hobby with you like gardening, shooting, or gold hoarding, they may begin to become interested in your particular survivalist slant on the subject.
With regards to getting your significant others and families involved in survivalism many people may suggest that you should just lay down the law, like Noah did, “we’re building an ark and that’s final. Now bake me up some flat bread or whatever”.
Sometimes you may need to put your foot down, but over all most of us will probably not have much luck running our families old testament style. Respect your loved ones concerns and they will most likely learn to respect your preps.
Have other suggestions – please share in the comments below.
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Really good post. I found #7 Look for Survival-Related Hobbies to be the one that worked best for us. Years ago, before my wife passed away, I used this ploy and it worked. It was an easy sell involving her in “vacation -related” activities and it produced very practical results – and it was fun.
Great article with very good ideas for getting a significant other on board. I think it all comes down to taking baby steps, demonstrating that what you are doing is rational and well-planned, and making the other person feel comfortable.
I have found that putting your foot down will help your cause about 1% of the time and harm it the other 99% of the time. Better to use gentle persuasion and try to get the other person involved in any way possible.
My husband is not very survival-minded, but he’s slowly getting around to it. Every now and then, I refer to some real-life situations and ask him how we’d cope, then he sees the importance of being prepared.
He’s always been used to me keeping a well-stocked larder. Long before I was a prepper, I had issues from my childhood that meant I never felt secure without plenty of food in stock, so it was always easier to let me keep a full larder. He soon found out that it’s really convenient, too – no worries about unexpected guests or keeping fed during illnesses, or staying in because the weather was bad. It soon became a normal facet of our married life.
We camped for many years, originally because we didn’t have the money for other types of holidays, but later because we enjoyed it and so did our daughter. He now reckons he’s too old for tents, plus he had a stroke 3 weeks ago, so now we have a small RV (miniscule by US standards), but we still visit camp sites with basic facilities, or wild camp. Oh, and the RV means I now keep two stocks of food – one at home, and one on the van.
My hobbies include wild food, cooking and preserving, so that’s always been an aspect of my life and he just goes along with that.
He’s very interested in all things to do with space, so recently we’ve been able to talk about EMP, with the result that he’s buying a generator and investing in solar power in the new outbuilding.
It looks like we may have brownouts in England until new power stations are built, so talking about that gave him an extra reason to consider a generator. Last winter we had a power cut that lasted all day, which was a great object lesson! As he then discovered we had NO means of heating or cooking during a power cut.
Our business also brings us into contact with bushcraft officinados (we retail technical fabrics such as ripstop) – again, that gives him little nudges when he hears others talk about survivalism.
I’m not sure he’ll ever completely ‘get it’, but the other day he did ask me what I’d do if the country/economy went turtle, and I said I’d have no hesitation in getting chickens – and now he’s talking about getting some!
I think the important thing is not to go nuts about the subject, don’t make everything a lesson – let your SO get some ideas for him/herself and try not to worry if it takes longer than you’d like.
While NRA handgun training might be good, you want to be sure to look at http://www.frontsight.com and check out the defensive handgun courses. You can subscribe to the email newsletter and get offers of a full membership for less than the cost of a course. The training is excellent. My wife, who had never fired a gun in her life, came through the two day course with flying colors, but she needed some individual support. At the end of the course she could start with a holstered pistol, draw and put two rounds into the center of mass of the target, with confidence. The courses also include a lot of information on the mental issues of using a fire arm for self-defense, gives some basic guidelines of when and where you can consider using a gun and when you should not even draw, and finally leaves the student with the confidence that they are generally capable and competent with a handgun. I’ve been a member for almost 9 years.
Good post from a man’s perspective. Especially if you are both fairly
young and reasonable people.
But most people I know with resistant spouses prepare without permission. I for one am sure not going to let my well being depend on whether my spouse approves of what I am doing or not.
My Ex was incapable of saving; money, time, food, anything that’s how she earned the title Ex. Being faithfull in a relationship is not just about things to not do. Faithfull, is also loyalty and being true to the dreams of your spouse. Or heeding the nightmares. If this is not understood you’ll never be TOGETHER no matter how long you hang around.
My husband dreams of a gadget-filled future with entertainment on tap and a variety of food available whenever he wants, and has trouble seeing that this might end one day.
However, I’m not giving up on him – when I married, I made a promise in church, before God, that I would stay married for better, for worse ‘until death do us part’ – and I meant it.
Bringing my SO on board was relatively easy. I wondered for several months how I was going to get her interested and aware. Then I started to read _One Second After_ and as soon as I was about a chapter into it I knew I had found the answer. She reads voraciously so when I was finished I simply handed her the book and told her it was fiction and kind of far fetched but that it had been carefully researched and that Newt Gingrich was partially responsible for the content. I didn’t say another word. After a week or two she picked it up and read it. When she was through reading it she was ready to start prepping.
I had already read Lights Out, Patriots and an online book called Long Road Home but I knew that those were guy books and she probably would get bogged down in the technospeak about weapons and such but One Second After was perfect and it worked.
Worked for us too! I read that this summer and it scared me silly.
My husband had been stocking guns and ammo for awhile, we had enough food for a couples months, but now were in full prepper mode. I’m just sorry I didn’t listen to him sooner (don’t tell him I said that.)
This is an excellent post. I cannot identify one item as being better than any other, they are all great. I do worry about someone who sleeps with a loaded AK in the closet :-)
You touched on an important point with #7 – survivalism is a way of life & prepping is simply the activity we do as a part of that lifestyle.
When things are motivated by a lifestyle and not doom & gloom, having the mate along for the ride is far easier.
When it dawned on me that the world was going to sh#t I intially tried to involved my (now ex) husband. I mean, I could see what was happening clearly so surely if pointed out the things I saw he would come to the same conclusion. Unfortunately he didn’t.
After a few discussions he tried to drag me off to see a psychologist because he was concerned about my mental state. That didn’t go down too well with me. I’m still convinced I wasn’t ranting and raving, just worried about the future and trying to make him see the implications that I saw.
Because I wasn’t working he controlled all the money and although I was free to spend as much of it as I liked on clothes, hair, makeup and lunch with the girls (which didn’t interest me anyway) I couldn’t spend a cent of it on preps! When I came home with the shopping he’d go over the reciept (matching it up with the bank statement) and question every single purchase of two of something. There wasn’t a can of food I could squirrel away anywhere in the house (after he discovered a stash he periodically went through the house searching for more) and although before this he’d been a keen camper and wanted me to start a vegie garden and get chickens now he was having none of it. He said he didn’t want to do any of that anymore because it was just fuelling my psychosis.
Yes it sucked bigtime and we weren’t together for much longer after that.
In retrospect, I would have done things differently. I would not have told him about anything, then he wouldn’t have gotten all upset and started questioning my every move. I would have done many of the things suggested here, especially camping more often and focusing on buying things for ‘future camping trips’. I would have been able to get the vegie garden up and running and start to learn to can the produce.
But in my defense I was 22, new to survivalism and feeling that urgent need to start making headway quicksmart before we ran out of time.
Luckily, because I didn’t hide who I was (#7), now I’m with another survivalist and its the best feeling to be able to discuss world events, preps, sceanarios etc and not be made to feel like a lunatic.
AJ – Good for you. I suspect it would have turned out the same even if you had done your prepping on the sly. Better to have discovered his psychological narrowmindedness early and cut your loss.
I wish the best to both of you. It’s a wonderful feeling to have your SO celebrate who you are.
Wow, AJ, that must have been tough. Life is damn hard to get through these days, even as a team. I can’t imagine dealing with all the crap life is throwing at us poor middle class slobs these days, without the support of my wife, who jumped on board with both feet when I brought up the desire to start prepping. She’s European, and had relatives who’d suffered during the war and passed down the tough stories of survival, and too little to eat. She remembered, and learned. She values independence, as do I, and we do not want to depend on the government to save our bacon should TSHTF.
when the shtf don’t be surprised if your X showes up looking for a handout.
Great post. Do you have a blog BGNoyce?
My Dearly Beloved thinks I’m a paranoid nut, but he loves me. He doesn’t mind if I buy dehydrators and food sealers. He carries heavy bags of grain for me, and helps me seal them in buckets. He doesn’t believe for a moment that the Great American Dream can ever hit so low that we’ll need to use my prepps, but he indulges me anyway. I suppose he knows I’m a scrapper, and I’d win my way anyway. He can love me or leave me. He’s made his choice. He digs the garden, I plant. I home can tons of food, and he builds shelves for it. He teases me about the “Double Doody” bags, and I tease that I’ll not let him use them. He’ll have to “go” out where the dogs do.
I am very fortunate in that my wife is as attuned to prepping as I am. It makes picking up information ,such as news ,how to’s ,twice as easy. I do have to sometimes slow her down just a bit because she wants 5tears of stores NOW! I have to remind her that we have day to day life we have to live and pay for. I must admit though it has been awesome having a wife encourage me to buy more guns mags and ammo.
Where can the online novel “Long Road Home” be found? I did a Google search and it comes up with a novel by Danielle Steele. That’s not the one you’re reffering to is it?
That title might not be exactly right. Maybe it is _the long road home_ or something else similar. I’ll see if I can find it. I had a PDF copy of it but lost that hard drive and I don’t think it survived the crash.
Actually I found it printed on another forum. It’s _The Long Road Home_
I don’t know if I’m allowed to post a link here for another site but I’ll try and see if MD objects. This is the first half of the book.
http://www.whenshtf.com/showthread.php?1215-The-Long-Road-Home/page1
For the rest of it substitute /page2.
I can’t find my pdf copy of it or I’d offer to send it to you.
I was particularly interested in this book because the initial scene takes place about 10 miles from my home as best I can figure it out and for the first 100 miles or so of his journey I am very familiar with the places he mentions.
You’ll also find it here in parts and more readable. This is the site I got it from. It just took me a while to find it again.
http://www.frugalsquirrels.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum;f=64;hardset=1000;start_point=150;DaysPrune=0
Again with apologies to M.D. if the links aren’t allowed.
Sgt. apparently MD didn’t allow my link. Use this search:
_The Long Road Home_ by Puternut
If that doesn’t work I’ll try again. That search should find the book at two locations. The one you might eat is the best. I’m sorry to be so cryptic but……….
OK, I see now that the links have been approved. thanks MD.
charlie,
Sometimes it may take several hours before I can check and approve / delete comments depending on how busy I am that day. I’ve been outside working most of the morning.
Charlie,
Thanks so much for posting the link for “The Long Road Home”. I’ve got a 3 day weekend coming up in a few days and will devour it then. BTW, your “cryptic” clue, LMAO! You’re right, I much rather prefer squirrel to “what hits the fan”…
Thanks again.
Reagite ut Defendatis
You’re welcome. It’s not a hard read. You’ll buss right through it but make sure you don’t have anything else to do when you start. You won’t want to put it down.
Finished reading “The Long Road Home” over the weekend. I enjoyed it and like most “survival fiction” works I’ve read over the years, it provided a few suggestions in regards to my preps. Needless to say, I’ll be picking up an inflatable “kiddie pool” the next time I’m at Wally World. Too bad the link provided for the dual AK setup he mentioned in the novel seemes to be inop. I had seen those available years ago for the Ruger 10/22 and even for the M1 Carbine, but those too seem to have become extinct on the market. The AK setup would definitely pack more of a punch and given their once-again affordability, as well as the affordability of the recent Romanian, Bulgarian and Korean knockoffs of the Chinese-style 75rd drums, it would be ideal. I’ll be keeping my eye out and scanning the web to try and find a manufacturer or even just plans for this. Thanks again.
Reagite ut Defendatis
Glad to be of service! Glad you enjoyed it.
It’s been a while since I read it and I’m sitting here trying to remember what he used the inflatable kiddy pool for. Maybe it will come to me. One thing he mentions in the book that I was never able to find is the railroad kit for a bicycle. If that is truely available and reliable that is a way to make a lot of time very quietly. Seems like I found some sort of kit but not like the one he mentioned. By the way, I was in a railroad museum a while back and they had an antique version of a railroad track bicycle on display but it looked pretty heavy and awkward to me.
I’m the gas pedal and my wife’s the brakes when it comes to prepping. We’re on a tight budget (who isn’t?) and so far we keep a balance. It’ll take us some time to get all the stuff we need, but we also won’t go broke doing it.
There’s frustration sometimes, but that’s just the worry over not having all we could if something went down today. We don’t fight about it, but we do have to compromise a lot of the time.
Let’s just say that the fashion stores and beauty salon really like it when I go to the gun show or order something online. In other words, if I get mine, she gets hers.
Some times fate interceeds in this debate between SO’s. Early 70′s I was a Dpty Sheriff and my (then) new wife from the midwest could not figure out why I would want to carry a GUN while off duty, not to mention cell phone and spare mag! Then one day while looking for a movie to watch at a mall we fell into a gang homicide shooting and I (with other cops) ended up in a foot chase across a major part of the city, gun in hand. Lets just say she got it. Still she thinks I am a little off with all the stuff I have put away, she just shugs.
I have heard the comment from both wife, and children, that if the end comes, I wouldn’t want to survive. I told them, ” okay, lets pretend the end is coming now, are you really going to commit suicide, just because you’re scared?” It came down to, they didn’t want to prepare, because they didn’t want to admit it might happen in their lifetime. getting past that was a major hurdle. Fear is a beast that is small, and easily beaten, or it may be allowed to grow until it is able to swallow the world.
Very interesting observation. In order to prepare for really bad things, we have to admit that really bad things can happen. And none of us wants to believe we are so vulnerable to such bad things.
Perhaps the best approach in this case is to prepare for things a little less scary: hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, ice storms, floods, power outtages. Wherever you live, one or more of these events can occur (and probably will at some point). They also happen frequently enough around the world that they aren’t quite so terrifying to think about.
By focusing on these smaller, but still significant threats, perhaps you can get your family on board with prepping without them having to admit the awful truth of just how bad things could (but hopefully won’t) get.
I recently got my wife to listen to talk radio with me on the way to work.I got tired of listening to the fm music and she usaly sleeps anyway.I listen to a conservative talk station called ksfo based in san fransisco.She is picking up well on it and I feel better.She is cool with me having guns and stockpiling ammo(in small doses)as christians we both believe in the shtf senario.She likes to camp and she knows that I like to 4 wheel. I am going slow not to scare her off. Steve
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