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Ploy

Help convincing my wife that jumping isnt a death wish

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Many great replies here.

The posts which address honesty, risk management and education appeal to me most.

Stay away from 'shady' arguments such as statistics, outright lies and just about anything RopeaDope wrote.

Risk management is not only how skydiving can be safer for you. You can also discuss the whether with her. Show her how you look at the clouds, the winds, turbulence and whatever and tell her why you would jump in those conditions, or why you WOULDN't. At the DZ, discuss landings with her. Explain the error someone makes during landing and point out the instructor walking over to debrief said jumper. Point out the hotshot newbie who lives in the margins of the rules and explain why he is an idiot. Show her some video's and debrief them with her. Show her the licence progression cards, the regulating authorities.

Show her, in fact, that there is way more to jumping out of an airplane than meeting the eye.
"That formation-stuff in freefall is just fun and games but with an open parachute it's starting to sound like, you know, an extreme sport."
~mom

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Or you should try to make her guilty for your unhappiness.

Don't argue, just use hers female tactics.
Be sad, quiet, reticent...
Use "nothing is wrong" sentence with sadness while putting your head down and turning away...etc...I'm sure you already learned all of that from her.
:-D :-D :-D

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I started jumping when my dad got cancer. He was getting the standard health screenings you're supposed to get at 50. He was mostly healthy, exercised, didn't drink or smoke and was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer immediately and passed away at 52. If you can do everything you're supposed to do and only make it to 52, I want to do everything I want to do.

So I started pursuing my A and found something I wanted like I had never wanted anything in my life, and my parents freaked out.

I made it clear that I was in it for the long haul, to be able to jump for as long as I can in my life. I had aerodynamic conversations with my engineer father, had them both read Above All Else, A Parachute and it's Pilot, and every book I could get my hands on. When incidents were on the news here and there I would explain what happened honestly. Personal decisions kill more in this sport than equipment failures do. I made it a point to learn as much about my equipment as I could, walking them through a gear check and explaining how everything works. And over and over again explaining that I want to jump as long as I can without injury or death. I don't jump if the weather is iffy, I don't jump with certain people, and I don't get on the plane with certain others, and if I'm not feeling it, I don't do it. I pull high (as dz's allow of course), fly conservatively, have a reserve at a 1:1 wingloading, and only do things where I have the option to bail if I feel like it or if someone freaks me out.

They were sold the first time they saw a picture of my smile during a jump. If you don't have happiness what do you have?

I did my first tandems as instructor yesterday and my mom wants to jump with me this summer. Opinions can change if you come at it with love, not force.

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I was paratrooper in the Army. The 48 jumps on my profile is my military jump number only. I'm proud of that number because hose 48 jumps were harder earned than any number of "fun jumps". I come at everything with a sense of humor, but also try to be outside the box, rather than regurgitating the same thing everyone else says, in order to simply offer additional possible perspectives. Many look at the number next to my name, which can be whatever number I decide to put there, and write me off. That's fine. The people who jump with me know what I'm all about.

As for skydiving, I got busted up pretty bad during a really bad couple of days in Afghanistan. I had to spend almost 18 months learning how to walk and do some other basic crap that people never give a second thought about. I was really sad having had my military career cut short and got into skydiving for the therapeutic value of it. I always thought it looked awesome, but hadn't ever got around to trying it.

When I started I got a lot of pushback from my wife and family. They nearly lost me once and didn't want to go through it again. They thought I was mindlessly engaging in high risk behavior because of issues stemming from PTSD. At first my day at the DZ was a taboo topic, but I couldn't not talk about it. They started to see how passionate I was about it and how much happier I was in the days following a jump. Now they see the good in it and for birthdays and Christmas, everyone puts money in my jump fund (a box my wife made that is all decorated up for skydiving).

Before skydiving, I "coped" with excessive alcohol use, and driving like an asshole on my Harley. Skydiving put me in check with myself. I don't drink at all now. Traded the bike for a parachute, and when a certain sight, smell, or sound pulls me back into the worst days of my life, all I have to do is think about any aspect of a jump and it brings me right back. When I look at the sky, I no longer slip into a quiet stare and replay the sight of a Medevac slowly dropping in to pick me up along with two of my dear friends who did not survive that dreadful flight. Now I look to the sky for solace.

If your family sees what it means to you, and how you approach it with a safe and respectful attitude, and they come to understand it isn't an adrenaline junky suicide activity, then they will come around.

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OP: "I guess I need to come at it from an emotional angle?"

I introduced a non jumper to our DZ family not long after she arrived in the US, having recently escaped oppression on the other side of the world. There was nothing self-righteous about her emotional response to our sport: "Skydiving is a path to loving life in "technicolor" and to an extent so extraordinary the average person can never hope to comprehend." (Paraphrased.) She saw skydiving as the embodiment of freedom she couldn't comprehend growing up in her native country. The OP appeared to be looking for an emotional angle.

The rest of the post was mine.

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I know this may sound a little crass, but bear with me.

In addition to the good advice give here...

Get a good deal of life insurance (ensure that skydiving is not excluded but you have to 100% honest if they ask if you plan to), preferably before you start jumping again. You can even get a couple of policies.

At least that gives her the comfort of knowing that if the unthinkable happens she, and any future children, will be taken care of.

I have enough that my kids will be able to go to college and my wife will be taken care of. Fortunately I took it out long before I started jumping, but I was still a smoker way back then.

My wife is not crazy that I'm a jumper but we've worked it out. It's more of a scheduling thing for us, but we just pick the days that work for us a week or so in advance and we tend to be good.

Blue skies man.
Chance favors the prepared mind.

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Really fantastic replies, thank you all for helping out. The common theme among all of you (and applies to me as well) is the happiness jumping brings. I appreciate all the input!

I actually relate the most with you RopeaDope- when I got home from Afghanistan (I was civilian, and am in no way thinking my garbage could ever compare to what you went through), I arrived to find my ex had taken everything I owned and moved out to live with her new boyfriend that had been living in my house while I was gone. I realized my life from age 22 through 28 had been absolutely wasted on this person. On leave passing through Dubai I went for my first tandem, and I was hooked. I found a new love, and a new family in the DZs I went to. I found freedom, and for the first time I felt alive. Every jump after that, I've felt the same.

So yea, I'm not just an adrenaline junky who only stops doing stupid stuff once he's dead. I hope my wife can see that, and I can see you all in the sky soon. Thanks!

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There is no sense in minimizing your experiences. Any stressor is going to be measured against one's own "normal" state of being. It isn't measured against another persons experience. I had a higher than average level exposure to combat, but I was also in a unit that had a higher than average level of physical and mental conditioning for it. You can always spot the people who are full of shit because they see it as a dick measuring contest.

No matter what capacity you experience a war zone in, the fact remains that you are isolated from your friends and family for an extended period of time and have no control over anything in your life. You can't be there to keep a girl honest, you can help with the broken water heater, and your life is frozen in time while everyone else's goes on without you.

As a contractor, you are in an environment where rockets and mortars fall from the sky, bullets come in from sniper rifles and heavy machine guns. RPGs, organized assaults on the FOB, and the insider threat posed by any ANA who is having a bad day keep you constantly on guard and remind you that death is walking among you waiting to take you.

To make matters worse, when you travel from FOB to FOB to employ your speciality, you present a soft target to the TBs and you don't have the assets dedicated to your mission that the Soldiers would have. If you stumble into trouble, you are reliant on a QRF to come to your aid and bring their assets to bear against the enemy. You may have been paid more than us to be there, but I wouldn't have traded jobs with you for anything.

You certainly gain a new perspective on life and the world you live in. With a significant other, it is a process where you have to meet in the middle. Your "concerns" are hers and hers are yours. Just communicate with her and find out exactly what her concerns are (beyond "it just seems dangerous"). Also convey to her what skydiving is to you. Address the stigma and any misunderstanding she has about the sport and let her know how you are taking her concerns into consideration and mitigating the risks.

Somewhere in between you disregarding her and jumping anyway, and never making a jump again, hopefully you can establish a mutual understanding. Consider all he "little" things. Emergency contact info, medical insurance, having all affairs in order in case of severe injury of death, identifying some of the more common skydiving incidents and how we identify and mitigate those. And so on...

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Ploy

... I hope my wife can see that, and I can see you all in the sky soon. Thanks!



And keep in mind, just because you can't get back in the sky this weekend, doesn't mean you have to convince her now or give up forever. It may take a little more time. Just remember that whenever you make it back, the sky will still be there for you. No rush! :)
See the upside, and always wear your parachute! -- Christopher Titus

Shut Up & Jump!

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Well...a dear cousin of mine died alone in bed. COD was a bloodclot.

I've had cancer. Surviving cancer WILL change your perspective on things. In all truth, given the choice between denting the Earth or dying from cancer; I'll take the former any day of the week and twice on Sunday...but I'd rather NOT dent the Earth all things considered.

If your wife is a "sharp cookie," logical, rational etc etc, good for her. Sounds like you married a good woman and I hope she got a good deal in reciprocity. However...ask her this question:

"Is there any absolute guarantee that you, her, me, the rest of us will be alive in the next 10 minutes?

I'd be interested to know what her answer is.

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Quote

a very long time ago I explicitly asked her, are you ok with being with a skydiver? I told her the stats and the risks, and at the time she understood and was still ok with it. After so much time has passed without me jumping, it seems she's pulling back from that



There are two sides to that coin, the amount of time you spend with her to full-fill your promise of a relationship and the amount of time you spend skydiving to ensure that you're becoming a competent and safe jumper. You're not the first one to be in this situation and a promise said by someone long ago who has no idea what they're agreeing to becomes something like an unconscionable agreement. Does she know that instead of being able to put $5000 towards a house that you're getting a rig? Does she know that you're spending another $2700/year jumping? And how about your intentions? It takes time at the DZ just meeting people and being social in order to find people to jump with and improve. Is she going to sit there while everyone talks about skydive stuff. The truth is it's fucking boring to date a skydiver.

Quote

If I could convince her to take AFF level 1, could that be an effective way to showcase how..



Nope. They have to want to do it, they have to have the bug. You can't ask her to do this just because you want it. If she ends up liking it then great but you have to be OK with it if she doesn't and that may mean you don't skydive anymore.
"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

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I think she is playing you honestly. If she did a tandem on your 3rd date, then why did she think she would be ok then and now is against it. Your title says "death wish" and in your post it says she is afraid you might get hurt. Either way though whichever it is I find it really disturbing that she jumped on a tandem and now apparently thinks that its not ok. So a tandem is ok but learning how yourself isn't!?!

I'd honestly call her out on it and ask her why in the hell she did a tandem back then if she thought its a "death wish". Sounds to me like she is manipulative and that she needs to be honest with you and is holding something back. I'd have a differing opinion on all of this is she hadn'talready done a skydive. That's just me though. Guess that's why I'm still single and never been married.

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gunsmokex

I think she is playing you honestly. If she did a tandem on your 3rd date, then why did she think she would be ok then and now is against it.



Simple. You don't try to understand the other person's frame of reference or the impact which an actual jump might have on said frame of reference.

For the vast majority of people there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all in their life's experience which compares to actually jumping out of an airplane for the first time.
Every primal instinct you have screams at you that "fall from high altitude = death". Overcoming those instincts is part of the thrill/reward, especially for tandem students who step into the roller coaster aspect of our sport with little preparation and training.

But freefall might well turn out to be your worst nightmare - even though it sounded fun, cool, exciting and thrilling beforehand. After you land, you know you never want to do it again. Especially if the TM 'helped' you out of the plane when you didn't want to go.
However, at least now you have experienced skydiving:

It's awful, noisy, overwhelming and you have no control over anything at all in this terrifying environment.

And then you realise you are dating someone who actually does this multiple times a day for fun. What the hell is wrong with them?


EDIT: clarity
"That formation-stuff in freefall is just fun and games but with an open parachute it's starting to sound like, you know, an extreme sport."
~mom

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i've opted to not tell mine when i'm doing it and also told her of my plan.

i have a mate who lives on the way to the local dz so now "i'm going to steve's" has a new meaning.

whether she forgot or is using it to manage her fears, i dunno... but it certainly has reduced the anxiety.

just do it, availability bias will soon kick in that skydiving does not equal death.

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gunsmokex

Either way though whichever it is I find it really disturbing that she jumped on a tandem and now apparently thinks that its not ok. So a tandem is ok but learning how yourself isn't!?!



I understand the sentiment but there's a difference between doing things once as a novelty once and adopting something as a lifestyle. (Baksteen made a similar point.)

For example, some young jumper on dz.com once had that issue: His parents didn't want him to start skydiving but came to accept he would go make a jump. He made his first jump, and the parents thought, "Phew, thankfully that's over with! He diced with death, has made a skydive, but now that'll be out of his system, no need to ever do that again!" Which might work for a majority of the people who do tandems, but for those who end up on dz.com, generally is just about the opposite of what they feel...

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14 May I will be married to the same woman for 39 years. She does now want anything bad to happen to me and she does understand there are risks. I review the accident reports and very often with her. I try to explain to her what happened and why. Some of the time you have to except the fact that if your luck was bad, the same thing could happen to you. But very often I can point out how this specific risk is very low for me. So if X people died last year, only N/X (a fraction) of those share a similar risk in the sport that I do.

While this does not make skydiving really any safer, it does something to more correctly define what risk each of us are exposed to.

The last Parachutist magazine has a breakdown on last year's fatal accidents, something very good to review.
Instructor quote, “What's weird is that you're older than my dad!”

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Interesting relevant thread over on the BASE forums

http://www.basejumper.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2987692;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread

Minimize the risk, jump small groups, jump a large 7 cell (Spectre) canopy, and have an ADD and you'll probably be fine.

But then again you can do everything right...

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Point well taken. I don't know crap about relationships but I think what I was trying to get at is that if she had no reservations about it then but now suddenly does....well that's just not very cool for a chick to pull that on a guy. Almost like being someone you aren't. I would think they would have talked about it then. Pretty damn cool to do that for a 3rd date, if I were in the same shoes I would have thought 'yeah this chick is pretty cool'. But yes I can see where that kind of mentality would come into play.

pchapman

*** Either way though whichever it is I find it really disturbing that she jumped on a tandem and now apparently thinks that its not ok. So a tandem is ok but learning how yourself isn't!?!



I understand the sentiment but there's a difference between doing things once as a novelty once and adopting something as a lifestyle. (Baksteen made a similar point.)

For example, some young jumper on dz.com once had that issue: His parents didn't want him to start skydiving but came to accept he would go make a jump. He made his first jump, and the parents thought, "Phew, thankfully that's over with! He diced with death, has made a skydive, but now that'll be out of his system, no need to ever do that again!" Which might work for a majority of the people who do tandems, but for those who end up on dz.com, generally is just about the opposite of what they feel...

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There's a big part of me that feels the same as you would gunsmokex. Irritated and mad that someone would pull the ol' switcheroo on me, especially when I feel like I did the right thing early on in the relationship and communicated to her that jumping is a strong passion of mine, and she needs to be OK with it to be with me. She not only went on that 3rd date with me, but also after we were engaged a friend of hers came to visit and wanted to go, so the three of us went. AND, for a long time we had been talking about getting her A license, and she seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the idea.

I put this in the Safety forum because it seems like she's apprehensive about the safety of the sport due to the long absence we've had from it. I think her fears for my safety are rooted in the fact that she doesnt truly remember the experience. So I've been paying particular attention to responses in this thread where you guys had experience overcoming the fears from the non-jumping people in your life. I KNOW once her initial fears and apprehension are tackled, we'll find that happy middle that Ropeadope spoke of.

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Ploy

There's a big part of me that feels the same as you would gunsmokex. Irritated and mad that someone would pull the ol' switcheroo on me, especially when I feel like I did the right thing early on in the relationship and communicated to her that jumping is a strong passion of mine, and she needs to be OK with it to be with me. She not only went on that 3rd date with me, but also after we were engaged a friend of hers came to visit and wanted to go, so the three of us went. AND, for a long time we had been talking about getting her A license, and she seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the idea.

I put this in the Safety forum because it seems like she's apprehensive about the safety of the sport due to the long absence we've had from it. I think her fears for my safety are rooted in the fact that she doesnt truly remember the experience. So I've been paying particular attention to responses in this thread where you guys had experience overcoming the fears from the non-jumping people in your life. I KNOW once her initial fears and apprehension are tackled, we'll find that happy middle that Ropeadope spoke of.



The truth is that there's no way for a significant other to know what it's like for your hobby to dominate the relationship. They only see it as some vague concept that makes you a little dangerous and don't realize that they're going to be sitting on their asses while you're having a ton of fun. If you can get her into it then bonus but figure out how to make it her idea. There's a food that changes everything in a relationship, a wedding cake. Seriously, what is she going to tell her mother about the weekend, that she sat around an airport where nobody would talk to her because she's a wuffo? If you want her in, gonna have to fork up for that AFF course and first rig.

I realize you're talking about the safety aspects but if you can't maintain your relationship well enough to stay in the sky then you can't stay in the sky enough to improve as a skydiver. Sure you can be safe doing two ways when you show up for one jump every other weekend...

How long have you been jumping anyway?
"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

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I started jumping young and progressed to freefall while single.Then I met somebody....

She didn't like it at all that I jumped out of planes. Period. It came to making that permanent decision and it ended up being her. I just accepted it sadly and did other things, but could not see a plane in the sky without looking up. Watching canopies in the air was really hard.

Then one weekend a guy we both knew did his first jump course, and could not stop gushing about it to my wife at work. He had to describe every sensation in minute detail. My wife said to him, "oh yeah, John has done that and was up to doing freefall." And then he wouldn't let up for sure. "You have to let him come out and jump again! The sport is so safe! and Blah Blah Blah..." Totally out of the blue she agreed and told me I should maybe go back to the air. Couldn't believe my luck!

I had stopped while on student status, but went back to retrain, was back freefalling on the first weekend at the DZ, and never looked back. It CAN happen that she will change her mind at some point! Now, in my case it was 11 years, and hopefully you won't wait that long, but nothing is really carved in granite except your headstone. While on hiatus I never pushed it or argued with her, just let it go, but kept my logbook accessible just in case.

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