Bikewifelife – the blog for bike wives (and husbands) around the globe.

Okay, so he must be around here somewhere!

It’s taken me a while to realize the unique challenges of being a bikewife. I didn’t even know I was one until a while ago. In fact, for a long time into my bike marriage (and let’s face it, if you marry a cyclist you marry bikes) I was a cyclist too, and I think that hid many of the symptoms of bikewifery. Now it is as clear as the difference between Shimano and Campy. I am a bikewife.

I first recognized the bikewife syndrome when I was still delusional, thinking that because I rode bikes too, there was nothing to worry about. I had just hired a very bright young woman as an assistant on a project I was working on. She was in her early twenties, and this was her first real job after college. She had recently married her boyfriend, and was telling me about the first time she met what was then her future mother in-law – I think we may have begun the conversation in a form of commiseration about in laws. The bike part came later.

She told me that they had gone to visit his mother and stay for the weekend. He was the only son, and he was still her precious little boy. The visit didn’t start out well for my poor assistant . It was pretty clear that she wasn’t what his Mom had in mind as a suitable girl for her darling little boy. And bikes were about to make the whole thing worse. At the end of the first day,he asked her if it would be okay if the next morning he went for a bike ride. She said she happily agreed, and then she said those fateful words…

That was before I understood that ‘going for a bike ride’ meant he’d be gone for hours!

And so it was. Five hours to be exact. Five hours, 38 minutes, and 24 seconds. He returned to find her shut in the bedroom, snotty nosed and tear-streaked, and his mother feeling smug and singing happily to herself as she bustled about the kitchen. 

She went on to tell me how they bought a two bedroom apartment so there would be a ‘bike room’. How they lived on the outskirts of town – even though it meant she had a terrible commute each day – so they could be closer to ‘good riding’. How there was always a bike chain in the kitchen sink. As she went on, I could only give her a hug and say, ‘There, there. I know. You’re a bike wife.’  

Are you a bike wife? Do you know – and care – about the difference between titanium, carbon, and aluminum, because you understand that these simple words affect whether your family goes on vacation to Hawaii, to visit your parents, or camping in the backyard? Do you recognize your spouse’s friends when they are in lycra and helmets, but wonder who that oddly familiar weirdo is in the suit waving to you on the street? Are your Sunday mornings – and early afternoons – spent alone with your cornflakes and reading the paper in solitude? Do you have a seemingly endless list of household chores and repairs that you know you eventually will just do yourself? Does the toolbox have more allen keys than all the other tools combined? Can your husband ride his bike up Mount Everest, but you have to open the pickle jar for him? Yes?

Welcome to the world of bikewives. It’s not easy being a bikewife, but take heart. You are not alone. We bikewives are here for you.