Does your taste in music, movies, or TV differ from that of your spouse or significant other, or are they largely the same? Have they come closer since you started being a couple?
I met my wife 20 years ago this summer. I was 19, she was 21.
She liked country music, I liked classic rock. And blues. And opera. But not that tub thumpin’ hillbilly horseshit.
She liked John Wayne, beach party, and Elvis movies. I liked dark dramas and horror.
She liked Chevys. I liked Toyotas.
I liked real food. She liked white bread and mayonnaise type crap.
She went to a pentecostal church and was deep into their belief system. I was a very lapsed catholic.
She was deeply prudish and had a very… well, pentecostal attitude towars sex. We were both virgins but I had at least bought a Penthouse or two in my time. She thought that was a horrible sin.
She wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful of it. I swore like a sailor.
Perhaps most significantly, I wanted to go to college and then med school to become a physician. She thought college was for elites that couldn’t work a real job like truck driving or roofing or something.
I still hate country. She listens mostly to celtic folk music now, but I think she listens to country when she’s alone in the car. When we’re together we tend to listen to heartland rock (Tom Petty, The Eagles) as its the closest compromise. I’m finding myself actually enjoying a lot of the celtic folk music too. But alone in the car, I still listen to my mullet rock.
She’s never warmed up to horror, but she likes suspense and ersatz creepy stuff like Supernatural. We’ve both evolved to the point where we watch very little television, and when we go to the movies in the theater (maybe 3 or 4 times a year) we let our teenage sons choose the flick.
We own a Chevy (hers), a Honda (mine), and a Subaru (will be our sons). Other than the fact that we both a) despise Fords and b) love classic muscle cars, our vehicle tastes haven’t changed too much. Although she would love to buy a Sequoia or a 4Runner some day, so maybe I’ve worn off on her.
I love to cook, and she’s still not a very good one, so she’s learned to appreciate cuisine that is several edibility steps above the slop her mother raised her on. When she cooks she makes simple, bland Betty Crocker-type stuff. I can’t complain too much, its light-years better than what she could make when I met her.
She no longer goes to church, and hasn’t in at least a decade. Her mother has guilt-tripped her mercilessly about this, thankfully she ignores it. I have been to one mass (a funeral) in the past two decades.
She long ago discovered her kinky side and embraced it fully.
She doesn’t cuss like a sailor quite yet, but she’ll say shit or even drop an F bomb when she’s pissed. But never around her mom.
Most significantly, after meeting my family, a large portion of whom went to and graduated college (and were living solid middle-class lifestyles because of it), she quickly embraced the concept of higher education and went to school herself – becoming the first person in her family, distant and extended family included, to graduate from college.*
So… basically she’s changed a lot more than I have. She came from a very conservative, xenophobic family (that’s another thing: she no longer votes Republican 
) that, while large, did not have any disparate opinions or beliefs. Everyone adopted the same family beliefs and tastes and traditions. To do otherwise Just Wasn’t Done. My family, while also large, was very diverse and came from different backgrounds and socio-economic statuses. She experienced diversity for the first time when she met me. I’m quite happy she shed a lot of the baggage her parents placed on her.
- My wife was in her sophomore year, we had both returned to school and were struggling to make ends meet while holding down jobs and raising two kids. One day her mom told her that it was my job to support my family and it was disgraceful that I was “making” her work and go to school. Instead I should drop out, get a "real job (I was working nights as a hospice caregiver / CNA), and let her quit school so she could take her rightful place as a housewife, just like God wanted her to.
I was not there for that conversation. I don’t particularly like my in-laws but I’ve always tolerated them. Had I been present that day my tolerance would have reached its breaking point. As my wife tells it, she told her mom that she’s going to school for herself, not because anyone told her to. And she will finish and get her degree, with or without her family’s support.
I earned my BA in 2016, and I earned my MA two days ago (sneak brag!). My in-laws have never acknowledged my BA or in any way acknowledged my 3 1/2 years of grad school.
We’re into similar things, but not quite the same, and we sometimes engage with them way differently.
Like, we’re mostly into the same kinds of video games (except that she likes ‘fuck you’ difficulty and I merely like a challenge, occasionally enjoying a cakewalk), but our attitudes towards mods are way different - she’s a ‘mod it till you break it’ girl, I prefer to use as few mods as possible to get the experience I want. She likes adding difficulty, extra quests, more enemies…I prefer only to add cosmetic shit and stuff that should have been in in the first place (reinstating dummied content, fixing bad UI choices, improving graphics, etc).
We have remarkably similar taste and have from the get-go. That’s one of the reasons we ended up married.
We probably share 70 - 80% of likes. She likes country music more than I do, I have more eclectic tastes. Food, pretty similar except that she knew how to cook all this interesting Mennonite stuff, but I got a taste for it immediately.
Books, I like sf and she likes mysteries few of which I read, except Brunetti.
Hell, our Sirius channels are very similar.
After 42 years my experience is that it is good to have a subset of different likes, so long as there is no conflict. And there hasn’t been.
The first time I was in my now gf’s home, I was looking through a stack of CDs. They were all Tom Waits. She started explaining to me who Old Tom was, and I started laughing. We are near twins when it comes to taste in music, our love of cooking, and gourmet dining. Our libraries (now kindle libraries) were very similar with many duplicates.
We hit our 36th anniversary last December. When we met, he was a divorced Baptist and I was a fairly hard-core Catholic. He had a fairly blue-collar upbringing and I had an engineering degree. He knew almost nothing of classical music, and while I wasn’t an expert, I did recognize some compositions. Other than that, our musical tastes were similar. I was timid when it came to trying new foods, but he’d pretty much try anything.
Now, we’re both pretty much non-religious - the last time we were in a church was for a funeral. He realized that he had the smarts to be an engineer, and he’s been doing that for about 30 years now - he’s actually a better engineer than I am. He’s learned a lot more about classical music and I’ve found I like a lot more foods than I’d imagined.
He still likes war movies and anything John Wayne ever made, and he’s none too fond of reading for pleasure. I’ve learned to tolerate some sci-fi without snarking (tho it’s sometimes a challenge.) There are things we each do separately (I hate motorcycles and he hates gardening) but overall, we have plenty of common ground to keep us going.
We probably overlap 70-80% or so in music and film. Over the years, she’s taken more songs from me than the reverse but she still has plenty of her own stuff. Neither of us read the same sort of things but, since that’s less of a shared experience, it’s no big deal. There’s plenty of “guy” movies she has no interest in and I’m not likely to engage in her Hallmark/Lifetime movie binges but there’s enough comedies, dramas and superhero movies to enjoy on the couch.
Mrs. J. and I have some overlap in cultural likes, but not all that much.
While we both enjoy things like early British rock and goofy pop hits, our musical tastes otherwise differ. For instance, she likes folk and Xmas music (which I can easily do without), and I never hear her cranking up Motorhead or Baroque suites. Movies - well, you go see that nice women’s film, have fun. I 'm into detective fiction, she’s heavily a non-fiction person.
However, we’re in relative concordance in two very important matters - political outlook and favorite foods.
I was just thinking the other day how my SO and I have such different musical tastes, and it sorta makes me mad. We both like 90s alternative and classic rock, but he has disdain for most of the stuff I’m passionate about now. Like hip hop and twee. We’ve never gone to a concert together.
He also can’t stand Monty Python or British sitcoms & panel shows. That’s like 75% of what I watch most. He thinks Tim & Eric are gods, they make me sick. We do both love Kids in the Hall so we’ve got that going for us.
Being that I’ve become so good at being single over my 40 years, I’m accustomed to liking what I like and experiencing it by myself, and going to shows & movies by myself or with random friends. So, fuck his weird tastes!
As of April 17th, we’ve been married 38 years.
Our music tastes are basically the same, although there are a few artists we really disagree on.
He’ll eat anything, I’m quite picky.
I love TV and have a DVR that’s full of all sorts of programs. He doesn’t watch as much TV as I do and there are only a handful of shows that we watch together and really enjoy.
I love to read. I don’t think he has ever read a book for pleasure/entertainment. He likes to read “how to do stuff” books when he needs to do stuff or when he’s curious about something.
We both love animals, we are both Christians, we love taking our grandkids places, we both like to be outdoors, we are on the same page when it comes to sex. So I guess when it comes to the important stuff we’re ok
We’re pretty much the same when it comes to music: jazz and older rock, mainly, with some classical thrown in. Also film, although I like some sci-fi and horror. She won’t watch the latter, and doesn’t much like action films. We both hate reality shows, and find most network programming to be puerile.
food, travel, ethics/morals/worldview are where we most closely align and that last ones ensures that the huge number of differing tastes we do have (music, film and TV, politics) never become a problem. Live and let live.
My wife and I are on our second go-around. We were together for a couple of years right after high school, then had no contact for 20 years. We’ve been together again since 2011.
Our politics have always been the same (on the liberal side), and our religion has always been the same (atheist).
There is a huge overlap in our tastes for movies and television. We have lots of stuff we watch together - sci-fi and fantasy, comedies, dramas, and whatnot. On the outside of this common ground, she likes to watch a lot of foreign stuff, like Bollywood movies or the Korean shows that are all over Netflix, which I have no interest in. And me, a lot of the comedy stuff I like is too stupid for her. I’m all for a good, thought-provoking flick that is funny, but sometimes I want mindless stupid funny like Dumb and Dumber. She hates that shit.
The biggest disparity is music. I’ve been heavily into progressive rock since I was 15 years old. She has no interest in it, never has. When we were kids, she was into alternative stuff like The Cure. I used to try to push prog on her, but the more mature me realizes that people like their own things.
When the 90s and the grunge scene came along, I dismissed it as garbage, and stopped paying attention to the popular music scene. (We broke up a few months before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” exploded). It turns out that she embraced it, which was no big surprise. She has always kept up with what is going on with mainstream music, but she does tend to prefer the more intelligent stuff over the boring drek. I’ve come to realize that some of the stuff that came out back in the '90s is actually pretty good. And she plays more recent stuff that is quite good, that I never would have heard about if I was on my own.
My wife has a limited appetite for anything that she considers weird. For instance, she once borrowed the movie The Lobster from the library and she called it the worst movie she has ever seen (although she has said that about other movies, too). I thought it was pretty good.
On my side, I have a limited appetite for my wife’s strategy of picking movies more or less at random; I like to have some idea beforehand about what I’m going to see.
Given a choice, my wife mostly listens to pop or classical music and I mostly listen to rock.
But there are plenty of shows we have watched together and both enjoyed (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Homeland, Downton Abbey, etc.). And whoever is driving gets to pick the radio station.
Considering that my husband and I met in an American Buddhist monastery (pretty small self-selected group), and both come from educated middle class backgrounds – and it’s our 38th wedding anniversary today – we are in many ways opposites. He comes from old New England and Tidewater money, and everyone in his family are unimaginative conventional people, all Baptists and mostly engineers (he is also an engineer). My mother’s family were Midwestern dairy farmers, my father’s family were New York Jews one generation from escaping Russian pogroms, and our house was always filled with books, modern art, opera music, etc.
One thing we have in common is that both our families were very grateful to the spouse, for marrying such a hopeless loser they had thought would be on their hands forever.
We may or may not be losers (we seem to be doing okay) but we are definitely odd, both of us, and quite differently from each other. In retirement all he wants to do is build things and fix things, which farm living provides opportunities for, in spades. He pretty much can build or fix anything you can think of. He doesn’t listen to music of any kind, or watch films, or go to any events at all. Hates all shopping. Doesn’t know how to use a camera, barely can use his smartphone to make phone calls (although he can fix computers).
I listen to all kinds of music as long as it isn’t popular – no rock, pop, country, rap, reggae – but most everything else, from Tuvan throat music to Russian Orthodox chant. I watch little quirky movies. I majored in English Lit, and had a modest fiction writing career, so I do read fiction.
We both like being alone most of the time. We rarely eat together although we’ll both cook and leave some in the pot for the other one.
Musically we’re pretty different. She tends more to country and folk; I like more rock and pop. But there is overlap: if we want to listen to music while driving down the road, it’s mutually approved: Fleetwood Mac or Eagles or Beatles etc.
Movies and TV: Fairly similar. If you widen the question, I’m more likely to watch documentaries, history, factual. She likes more fanciful things but TBH, she’s much more about getting out and gardening or walking, having sat behind a desk at work all day.
We have a TV in the living room and another in the bedroom. My computer is near the TV but I have headphones that can drown out whatever she’s watching. If we’re watching together, maybe it’s “Chopped” or “Drunk History” or “Cash Cab.”
I don’t think our tastes have become closer. I think we went through a phase of “You want to watch THAT?” to figuring everybody has their own tastes. We don’t sit through what the other wants just to be nice.
Even within a medium there can be differences of opinion…some like Eric Clapton’s unplugged “Layla” and others know the original electrified one, with its exquisite
piano coda, is the far superior version. Still, you have to love the person in spite of their flaws.
I knew my wife was the one for me when she tossed out a reference to Dan Hicks. I was gobsmacked. Nobody I knew knew who Dan Hicks was. (I had actually gotten into Dan Hicks via Thomas Dolby, who covered “I Scare Myself” on his second album.)
I would say we share the same tastes in music, but she doesn’t listen to a lot of music on her own, so it’s more like a tolerance of what I listen to and occasionally latching onto something she likes.
TV, we watch a lot of stuff together, but she also likes various CBS dramas and Big Bang Theory reruns that I get tired of quickly, so I’ll go watch something on Netflix that I figure she wouldn’t be interested in.
Food wise we’re mostly on the same page, though I wish I could get her interested in Indian or Thai. (I guess that’s what I have a “work wife” for. :D)
Ever seen a Venn Diagram that looks like two circles?
She reads Jane Austen while I devour comic books.
She’s binging British Baking Shows. Me? Fun old comedies. Currently Community.
If I’m driving on a trip and invoke the “Driver picks the tunes” rule, she’ll promptly fall asleep. Which she actually plans on: “I need a nap… Could you put on some of your noise?”
Oh, and she’ll make herself a huge salad and top it with a little bit of the Dead Pig I grilled. I don’t mind, I get the rest.
I think We’re together because he knew who Dave Van Ronk was. And hates fruit in “real” food as I do.