I don’t mean to imply that your husband is not an honorable and faithful man, but I’m not an overly jealous woman and this made me
.
How do you deal with this? When I think ice dancing I think tight outfits, lots of physical contact, and lots of alone time together working on a shared goal and passion. I would completely lose it if my husband frequently traveled several hundred miles to stay in another city without me to do something like that. Heck, even if you take away the tight outfits and physical contact I wouldn’t want him going. Traveling alone to spend a weekend with his woodworking partner still wouldn’t make me happy. How do you avoid jealousy?
And before anyone jumps down my throat about insecurity and trust I would like to mention that this doesn’t illustrate a problem with either. I just believe that no one sets out to have an affair, emotional or physical, and I believe in safeguarding marriages. Better safe than divorced and devastated.
When my husband heard this question, especially the comment about “no one sets out to have an affair,” he said, “Oh, yes they do.” Hmmm.
So he’s very aware of the risks. But he also takes his wedding vows very seriously. We’ve been married 33 years.
Ice dancing is a sport. There’s touching, yes, but it’s a sport. There’s touching in football, but guys don’t question whether a guy is gay just because his hand brushed their rear during a game or a practice.
I’m not jealous at all. I’m just as pretty and sexy as she is
, and my personality, religion, political views, child-rearing philosophies, etc. are all perfectly compatible with my husband. Her personality, religion, political views, etc. are NOT at all compatible with my husband. In fact, they probably wouldn’t be friends at all if it wasn’t for the ice dancing. The sole interest that both of them have in each other is ice dancing.
It’s darn hard for a woman to find an ice dancing partner in the U.S. Many families would not even consider the slight possibility of allowing their sons to don a pair of figure skates; people are gay-phobic, and somehow they have the very incorrect idea that most male figure skaters are gay. I know of fathers who are so against male figure skating that they offered to pay their sons to quit the sport.
There are probably a 1000 girls/women for every male in the sport, maybe more, at least in the United States.
I think that more people in the U.S. accept and support gay marriage than accept male figure skating. Maybe we ought to hire the same people who did the PR for gay marriage and managed to convince an entire country, including many Christians (and Catholic Christians) that gay marriage is beautiful.
Parents, let me give you a little tip that might pay for your son’s college: skating clubs PAY boys to come to their rinks and test ice dancing with their young female figure skaters. For years, we knew a young man in Chicago travelled every weekend to rinks all over the country to do this testing. The clubs would pay his expense (air fare, hotel, etc.) AND pay him a hefty fee, usually around a $1000, to test. A few years of that, and you’ll have that college paid for! The only thing you have to do is get your son into figure skating by the time he is around 5-6 years old, and as soon as he has mastered the basic skills of singles skating, get him into ice dancing lessons so that he can start mastering those skills and passing the tests. The ice dancing skills are very different than the jumps, spins, and footwork of singles skating, and some would say ice dancing tests are the most difficult to pass. So don’t wait.
However, the skating federation is aware of the difficulties, and so they allow female coaches to test with female students. The problem is, the higher-level ice dancing tests are really difficult to do without a male-female partnering. Also, a lot of the coaches simply can’t do the very difficult higher-level tests anymore.
There’s also solo ice dancing and testing, but once a skater begins testing solo, they aren’t allowed to find a partner and start competing at that level; instead, they have to start over and test all the tests again with a partner. Ca-ching. Money drain.
So most female skaters prefer to test with a male partner, if they can dig one up. (No, those giant life-life puppets that you attach to your feet are not allowed.)
Frankly, I think that the International Skating Union ought to allow same-sex ice dancing in competitions. LOTS of countries have same-sex dancing (happens at almost wedding in the U.S.), and there is no sexual connotation. However, ice dancing is currently most similiar to ballroom dancing, and ballroom is strictly male-female, at least for now.
So anyway, this woman, as incompatible personally as she is with my husband, is willing to set all that aside in order to have him as an ice dancing partner. And there is a line of other women hoping that he will eventually end the partnership and pair up with them.
My husband is willing to set aside his personality differences in order to skate with this woman, who is a fine singles skater, BTW. They have travelled all over the country and placed well at their level.
It’s a sport. It’s like hunting, only with skates instead of guns.
We’re an odd bunch. There’s plenty of tension and weirdness to go around as well, but that’s all part of the fun 
But I worked out a deal for a split: July 15th-31st and August 16th-31st. So we’ll at least get roughly two weeks together.