When people say that children change everything, they mean it....
On my first date with my wife, we went to a coffee shop. It was the usual chit-chat, just asking about interests and so forth. Since I had just started playing hobby games, I mentioned that I liked to play board games a lot. I assumed the conversation would end there, so I didn’t offer many details. But then she asked me if I’d heard of a game she enjoyed. She couldn’t recall the name, but it involved little wooden men and small tiles that you played together to create roads and cities that gave you points. She was talking about Carcassonne, a game that I had also recently discovered. It was a nice bit of common ground in that nervous world of the first date.
That makes it sound a little like board games brought us together, and I assure you this was not the case. I have plenty of good female friends who are fun to play games with, so if that was my only standard I wouldn’t have been so picky. But for a long time my wife and I did play a lot of games together. It was a standard way to spend an evening for a while. It continued after we got married, for at least a year or so. But then…we had that first kid.