Married to the Hobby
Confessions of a Watch Collector's Wife
The other day, my buddy Jas suggested it would be fun to read a watch collector’s wife’s perspective on the hobby, and my immediate response was: “Challenge accepted.”
Let me clarify upfront, this is a fictional tale, and certainly not representative of my own experience (or anyone else in particular for that matter!). It is a dramatised account of a theoretical collector’s wife. To a large extent I ended up idealising what collectors with partners might want... but please, share your opinion in the comments afterwards.
I have of course drawn from countless conversations with collectors over the years, observations at GTGs, and plenty of WhatsApp group discussions about the “domestic challenges” of our hobby. So yeah, it might be fictional, but this post attempts to look at some topics which might come up if you share your life with someone who gets excited about calibres, case thicknesses and complications.
Right then, here we go...
Estimated reading time: ~15 minutes
When people ask me what it’s like being married to a watch collector, I usually fake-laugh and say something like “Well, at least he’s always on time!” In reality, this life is far more nuanced than my little joke suggests. After a decade of marriage to someone who can spot a bezel insert from across a room, I’ve learned quite a bit about this weird world.
In the Beginning
I married someone who owned three watches. Legit, three. A sensible number, I thought. One dressy piece for work, one sportier piece for the weekend, and that vintage Citizen he’d inherited from his grandfather. Sounds like every other simpleton, non-collector you might encounter.
Today, I’ve genuinely lost count. I am not saying there are hundreds (we’re not at that level yet), but quite frankly, the collection is constantly evolving. Watches come in, watches go out, and apparently there’s some complex internal logic to it all that I am yet to decode.
If I recall correctly, the “transformation” started innocently enough. A colleague of his mentioned Rolex, then there were some YouTube related watch videos, then someone at a dinner party was wearing “something special”, and before I knew it, my husband had discovered Reddit forums, RedBar Groups, and what I now know is called “the rabbit hole.”
Learning Curve
I found myself picking up the vocabulary without even trying. I can now confidently distinguish between a “rattrapante” (rat-raa-paan-t) and a “basic b1tch chronograph”, and I still think it’s astonishing1 that grown men get visibly aroused by tiny differences in text that you need a magnifying glass… nay, “loupe”, to see. I even got my girls to describe poorly-endowed men as “dot over ninety” boys, and I am now also programmed to think less of people wearing Hublot watches (even though I have no idea why that is true).
I also learned quite quickly that saying “nice watch” to another collector at a party is like offering someone a drink; it will lead to a much longer conversation than you bargained for. And yes, I have therefore become surprisingly good at gracefully extracting my husband from these conversations when they’ve gone on for forty-five minutes and we haven’t even ordered dinner yet.
My friends think I’m stupid for “putting up” with this, by the way. My one friend’s husband collects golf clubs, which she finds irritating enough, but at least those stay in the garage. Another’s partner is into vintage cars, but he only has a few and they appreciate in value quite predictably. When I tell them about the constant research, the forum discussions, the multiple watches that do essentially the same thing, they look at me like I am supporting some sort of cult-like behaviour. I will explain my rationale shortly, but thought it was worth mentioning that “spouse tolerance” is definitely on a spectrum, where I score about 9/10 and therefore, be warned, YMMV2!
I could go on about all these nuances, but let’s move on to money, shall we?