I just remembered being asked this one awhile back. Figured might as well put a detailed answer here.

Q: You're married right? Is your wife in the fandom as well?

Not... really. She's fully aware of the fandom, and that I'm part of it. She's watched clips of the show, and knows enough about it to be able to proofread/proofview what creative output I have and have a reasonably educated opinion. But that's all. In her own words, "I'm already into too many things right now."

She's a fan of a lot of stuff; Lord of the Rings, Hammer Horror movies, Highlander, Jane Austin stuff, Doctor Who, British murder mysteries, anything by Issac Asimov, La Femme Nikita, so on and so forth. A good chunk of which overlaps with my own fandoms, but not all.

In many cases her ability to be a 'fan' came pretty late in life. She had what to me was a very strange upbringing, mostly stemming from her mother who is a fanatical Baptist (to the point of being a kind of new Puritan), but was also a closet Trekkie who hid her Star Trek collection from everyone including her own daughter, out of shame and fear. This led to her punishing her daughter if she showed any signs of being a 'fan' just in case it accidentally revealed her own interests. This lasted until my wife because independent, going off to University (for Technical Writing), and was able to escape.

Even then, my wife wasn't able to really enjoy being a fan of anything until much later. It's how we met, actually. Trying to exert her independence, she joined a live steel stage combat troupe. A kind of acting troupe that specializes in doing fight scenes on stage and on film using accurate weapons and armor in an effort to provide realistic looking (and sounding) fights. Mostly medieval and swashbuckling kind of thing. I was a TA in the troupe's academy at the time, having done medieval martial arts and the like prior to joining the troupe. The final set of classes are on advanced choreography for presenting large 'chaotic' group battlescenes, and dealing with the two most dangerous weapons to use on stage, the flail and the dagger. Now it's pretty obvious why the flail is dangerous, as it's impossible to pull blows using it without it looking damn stupid. But the dagger being in that list usually confuses people.

The problem with it, is that it's small and fast. There's no margin for error when using a real dagger (dull, but still) up on stage. The audience is usually far enough away that it's hard to see the dagger and what you need to do to make it obvious that you've got this dagger, and you're doing something with it, means a lot of the standard tricks to make it safe don't work anymore. You have to be really, really precise with your movements. And with a lot of the realistic dagger maneuvers, there's no time or possibility for the 'victim' to be able to adjust if you make a mistake.

So here I am as TA in this class. That basically means I'm a practice dummy. I get to stand there while people pretend to stab me with a knife, one so the students learn the right spacing and timing, and two so they get used to their 'victim' reacting correctly. And one day, when we're doing back kills, I forget to bring my maille hauberk. And the obvious happens.

After this woman stabbed me in the back for real, I figure we've gotten the worst out of the way already, and we got married.