Being a World of Warcraft Widow

I started playing World of Warcraft in early 2005 with an ex boyfriend of mine. I played for a few months before the boyfriend and I broke up, and he took my account with him.

Fast forward to 2006, my husband bought me World of Warcraft to play in order to preoccupy myself. It wasn't long after we got married that I conceived our daughter and I was going to be staying home with nothing to do.

At first, my husband said that World of Warcraft was "stupid" and that he "didn't understand why anyone would play it". But that didn't take long. I'd been playing for about two weeks when my husband decided to give it a go. A week later, I lost my account to him as he'd begun to completely take over.

A long time friend of mine suggested we switch servers to play with him, and since we were still pretty new to the game, it was easy enough to just start over fresh on a different server. That's how we ended up on Thunderhorn. A few more friends I'd known over the years on another game called the Realm Online decided to make the switch to WoW and came to play with us. Because of that, I decided to start our own little guild called Divine Illusion (yeah, yeah...it was many months later that I discovered that Divine Illusion is actually another RPG oops!).

The guild was started as a place for us to just talk, keep in touch easier, level and have a good time. But my husband and I were still sharing an account and it became harder and harder to get any play time because of it. He was easily sucked in and would come home from work at 6pm and play until 2-3 in the morning! Needless to say, we've had many talks about his gaming habits. I eventually gave up on playing and let him have it. It wasn't worth arguing over.

The guild quickly grew in his control and morphed into one of the largest, casual guilds on the server (which is quite impressive since Thunderhorn was quite a large server to begin with). We purchased an account for myself and I began playing again when the guild was about six months old. But Thunderhorn was such a large server that queue times had grown unbearable and in anticipation of the Burning Crusade expansion, free transfers to new realms were offered.

We were hesitant, and didn't take the first offer to move to the newly created Ravencrest server. But once threats of simply moving accounts themselves was brought up by Blizzard, we decided to take our chances and moved the guild to the newly made Zangarmarsh. A good portion of our guild came with us - most of the officers and long time loyal members.

After the move, we instantly began to recruit to pick up any stranglers. Several servers were offered free transfers to ours - including the very large Whisperwind server (ironically, the server I had started out on back in 2005 with my ex). Things were great and our numbers were growing! We quickly became one of the stronger guilds on the server.

Today we stand at over 200 individual accounts - and that's a mighty lot of people. Of course, running a guild of that size takes A LOT of personal time - which is how I became a World of Warcraft Widow.

My husband has spent the majority of our marriage working 12 hour shifts at work - not including the hours spent on commuting, PT, extra duty, Platoon meetings and doctor's appointments. Needless to say, we don't always get a lot of time together. We get even less time because of World of Warcraft!

Don't get me wrong... I love the game and have enjoyed it. But it's always been more of a pastime and extra hobby for me rather than a responsibility. Running a guild is work..but I never wanted it to become a full time job. Heck, between being a wife, mother and running my online store - I've already got three of those!

It's no surprise that I tend to not log in very often. It's usually every few days. It's become hard to even play the game because as soon as I log in, I have to work - instead of just taking my character to wherever I want and actually playing. It should come as no surprise that my character is still three levels shy of the level cap and that's only because my husband took a couple of hours and blasted me through a bunch of quests.

My husband on the other hand, has been level 70 for quite some time now and has spent countless hours grinding reputation for whatever faction suits his fancy. This week, he's big into leveling up his fishing skill and is already up to 375. In fact, for his birthday, he purchased a set of WoW Trading cards so he could have the code for a fishing chair in the game. *Sigh* Way to spend money in a useless manner dear. Oh well, happy birthday!

My husband often comes home and talks to me for a few minutes, but the moment I step out of the room, he quickly logs into the game. I have to be prepared when he comes home to try to keep him occupied more than five minutes, or that's it.. he'll get on the game and I won't really see him again until the next day when we repeat the process.

Don't get me wrong... we spend time together. It just feels like it's few and far between these days. I blame the game...while he tells me it has nothing to do with it. I don't think he even realizes just how much time he spends on it. He'll come to bed at 3am when he has to get up at 6am for work. He'll sit there and play for 12 hours straight, without noticing. He's forgotten to wake me up from naps on many occasions because of it.

My birthday is coming up.. and part of his gift to me is supposed to be a World of Warcraft free birthday. We'll see how that goes...

Labels: birthday, gamers, gaming, life, marriage, shirts, world of warcraft, wow stole my husband