Movies, reading, music. My spouse is a workaholic. All he wants to do for 15 hours a day and 7 days a week is work. He see things like books and movies as a waste of time. The only thing he will watch on TV is the news and weather. He does not mind what I do though.
This place, for one. 
We have his and hers.
Mine is bowling. I love to bowl, started when I was 12. I came close to be pro level, but those days are gone. Now I’m in two leagues and having a grand time. She’s meh about it.
Hers is religion. She’s an in-the-vein Catholic. I’m meh about it.
On Sunday morning, she gets up and goes to church, and I sleep late. Then she comes home and an hour of so later, I go to one of my leagues and she snoozes on the couch. It’s all good.
Poetry. Including mine.
I completely understand.
Same situation here. She’s a joiner, anything I do she’ll end up participating in to some degree. But I couldn’t care less about music. She knows all the artists and latest hits, I know some music trivia from the days of yore, that’s about it.
A pretty random and trivial observation on my part; but this brings to mind for me, a post some while ago on another board which I frequent – same subject, but gender-split between the couple was the other way round. The husband was extremely into “everything Halloween”, and started his preparations and “countdown” months in advance; she just didn’t care and wasn’t interested, and was unable to fake enthusiasm. They weren’t looking at parting ways – but it frustrated him that she couldn’t and didn’t share this passion of his, and join in; and it annoyed her, that this frustrated him.
(I’m English, nearing seventy – when I was a kid, Halloween was just “this strange thing that they had in America”, and I’m afraid I’ve never seen the point of it.)
Ha! That explains it; he’s English too 
Why you people don’t like to get your fancy dress on I do not know.
Some literary genres like age of sail historical novels and science fiction.
Also movies (I’m mostly into the 1930s-1960s) - the problem isn’t that she expresses disinterest, in the contrary she expresses interest but then goes to sleep during the movie. After we saw The Third Man I was overjoyed that she had not fallen asleep but the next day I referred Harry Lime’s speech in the Ferris wheel scene and she asked: what Ferris wheel? :eek:
The literary genre thing does not bother me, the not bothering to stay awake through movies that I had been very much looking forward to watching again with her bothers me very much 
I attribute it to the old “Wars of Religion”. In England, we have Guy Fawkes’s Day (Nov. 5th), almost the same time of year, with actually a certain amount of the same kind of goings-on, and bonfires and fireworks to boot. And by the same token, I’d reckon that we long felt a bit suspicious of “All Souls”-type stuff – feels a bit Popish, don’t you know?
Why the hey not? I mean, this just so happens to be the person that you wish to spend the rest of your life with and you are supposedly deeply in love with…
Why would you be drawn to them and fall in love with them, otherwise? Music, films, books, long drives in the countryside as the sun sets, sunrises over the ocean while the water laps gently at your feet, silliness while baking cookies, hide and seek in the corn maze, singing your favorite songs in perfect harmony while blasting down the highway [i.e. choose your passions, zillions of them exist in this world, after all]…
The above is as bizarre a statement as I’ve ever read on the Dope, and that is saying something. :eek:
But two people don’t have to be the same. If anything, that would be rather uninteresting. Having differing interests allows you to learn more about someone else, to share something with them that is new to you.
If they like all the same things, you’re exposed to nothing new.
True. Before I met my wife, I had more than one relationship that withered because of some variation of this.
Common interests and senses of humor brought us together. The fact that we both found it easy to get involved in the interests we didn’t originally share brought us closer together.
I’m with Chimera. I bond with my spouse because we have built a family and manage a household together, and we are each other’s primary emotional companion and confidants. I don’t feel like we need to bond over having the same favorite color or sharing a shoe size.
(bolding added)
But you admit that would be awfully handy, right? 
On our 1st date we both agreed we loved to ride+agreed to meet up to bike along a parkway (Natchez Trace) where I was working the next week. I pulled into a Mississippi River overlook and seeing he wasn’t there, got my bike off it’s rack. He was there. I hadn’t noticed the Harley.
Our whole relationship’s been like that. He started laughing.
Him: NASCAR, motorcycles, Professional sporting events, awful horror/Sci-Fi movies (like from the 50s, with people walking around in salt domes moaning), Las Vegas.
Me: cross-country skiing, art museums, Italian fashion, cooking, constucting art design.
He asked me to marry him on the 3rd date…13 years ago, last weekend…(we didn’t) then did, never looked back.
I bicycle a lot and Pandora has absolutely no interest. I occasionally try to get her to come with me, but am really always joking. She just looks at me and says nothing. But then, what do you expect from a cat?
Cars and motorcycles were the first thing to come to mind. This is so common one of my car forums has a thread exclusively devoted to pictures of bored significant others at car shows.
It’s never bothered me, and I see different interests as a chance to learn something new. Previous girlfriends are why I learned about various types of music, wine, and why I know how to knit. The only thing I couldn’t get into was Beanie Babies, and there’s still too much residual info in my head about those.
Off-the-wall humor. Monty Python, the Marx Brothers (of course!), Firesign Theatre, stuff like that. I love it, and it does absolutely nothing for my wife.
The flip side is, she’s very into craft stuff, genealogy, and some other stuff that I have a hard time caring about.
Our tastes in music overlap to a large degree, but each of us likes a lot of music that the other doesn’t. I will never like Barry Manilow; she will never like Modest Mouse. We both like Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and plenty of other stuff.
We’ve been together 28 years, and married for 25. If the occasional differing interests were going to be an issue with us, it would have happened a long time ago.
Things I dig that my wife is meh about: Heavy metal, bad action movies, completing tasks in an organized and methodical manner, dad jokes, complaining.
Things my wife digs that I’m meh about: Historical fiction, bad television series, planning things out months in advance only to change your mind at the last minute, curry, lousy storytelling.
We’ve got plenty of overlap in other areas, so it works out okay.
The only TV show we both like is The Big Bang Theory. Otherwise it is police drama for her, and the Comedy Channel for me.
I love to grow plants, and she apparently has a brown arm.
She likes live theater while I prefer the movies.
She likes contemporary pop music but I much prefer Jimmy Buffett.
I hate shopping, however she considers it a fun hobby to go to estate sales.
Give me physical exercise, and building projects and I am happy; she wants just enough soft exercise to keep up minimal conditioning.
Dawn is my friend and I love to greet it, while she seeks the midnight hour.
But…I like and love her…we have shared the same values and goals over the past 56 years. Raised kids, built financial stability, and still commonly have long discussions on a wide range of topics. And we have always vacationed together. I get to haul the luggage, and she sets the schedule. Good partnership. Lots of room for two very different people in our couple bond.