I appreciate how hard it is in the horse world to find a suitable match, regardless of gender. The horse world is small and… a bit too circular in some circles. How about the possibility of converting someone? I couldn’t find what I was looking for in the horsey scene so ‘settled’ for a non-horsey SO; he now has the horse-care education of a C level Pony Clubber and enjoys the occasional hack in the woods. Added bonus is he always comes to shows no matter how small they are! You’ll find your person, they are out there. 
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You problem is clear: you should be dating a horse veterinarian, not a fellow competitor. Dating another eventer will just increase costs and lead to strife over who gets to attend which show. The veterinarian on the other hand will have no time to horse show regularly or even ride and so will be happy to have you at the barn as you can also ride their horse and keep it fit.
I still feel stupid for not marrying the farrier I dated in my 20s. Think of the money I would have saved.
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I kinda like my car guy as a partner. He’s got 0 opinions about what I should or shouldn’t do with the horses, it seems completely normal to him that the horses cost a bunch of money and he keeps all the trucks, trailers, tractors etc. in tip top shape. Bonus he can park any rig anywhere I point at 
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IMHO a good partner doesn’t need to understand the horse passion—just respect and maybe even appreciate it. It’s kinda like the difference between sympathy and empathy.
Lol! My hubby is similar but probably more like a D-3. I will have to train him some more! He’s so cute though. When we first started dating he bought a nonfiction horse book so he could learn about what’s important to me. 
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Okay. That’s adorable
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Omg, that is so cute he bought books!! You are totally right. It isn’t the understanding the passion that matters, but the understanding it’s something important and drives you. 
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I’ve got a friend who is dating a farrier!
Apparently the downside is that, after shoeing other people’s horses all day, he doesn’t want to come home and shoe her horses
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I say pick a SO who isn’t horsey and has a cheap hobby, so YOU get all the discretionary funds!
My husband’s hobby is reading exceptionally boring books, most of which his job pays for (he’s a law professor). And socializing (he’s a fantastic friend and has an active social life.)
However, at some point in his readings he happened upon Wendell Berry, so he fashions himself a gentleman farmer and I get to run a horse farm.
The downside is that we do host a lot of parties. If I could be said to have another hobby it would be cooking, though, so I can mostly hide in the kitchen and he doesn’t make me to go outside parties very often, he knows I hate them.
It’s definitely a balance. I took about a decade off of showing to have kids. Now I show sparingly, planning out the minimum I need to qualify for USDF All Breeds and sticking to that.
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Replying as I’m catching up on this. This is accurate in my case as well. Never wanted kids and am glad for that as it’s afforded me a comfortable lifestyle. It was after my divorce that I got my boy and my finances became my finances (I supported ex husband) and I also got a decent promotion around that time.
Fast forwarding a few years later, SO and I moved in together and make similar salaires. Splitting our monthly expenses has opened more flexibility up for me financially as well. He had no kids and we have a new house but it’s a smallish townhouse so we aren’t even close to owning what we could afford on paper. He also kept his condo which was paid in full and is now renting it. Our finances are not shared at this point, but we both can live comfortably.
I am happy to live smaller for the trade offs that affords me!
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This is an awesome analogy. Thanks for the laugh! I love these forums.
I think having a supportive but not horsey spouse is the best way to go about it money wise. When my SO got his horse it was a bit of sticker shock that horse shows, shoeing, vet bills, etc, all cost twice as much now that there were two horses instead of one. Who’d a thunk?
That being said, I absolutely love being able to share my life’s passion with him. It’s totally worth it, especially since we both have the same life goals to own a horse farm and never have human children.
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In a discussion of whether riding is a sport (I didn’t care either way), a friend described it as a lifestyle. I bristled. Horses, regardless of how I gain access, or whose they are, are not home decor, recipes, or landscaping. (Okay, maybe a little.) Lifestyles are for influencers and glossy magazines. Horses are as essential as oxygen.
I am stone-cold obsessed and have been since I was six. Obsession is the only word that comes close and I’ll do nearly anything to keep riding.
For about five minutes, thanks to a dead relative’s super smart father and the economy of the 1960s, I had enough real money to afford them. What did I do? Go off and marry a misogynist and promptly have a son. Then I spent nearly all of it on divorce lawyers to maintain contact with my kid.
Ultimately lucky 20 years later, I have health enough to work off some of my healthy barefoot TB’s board. Got certified to teach riding and have a few excellent clients. Live in California so my ACA options are cheap and plentiful and took my teensy retirement pension from years as a teacher. My son’s apprenticed to a big-time Kentucky racetrack farrier so amazingly have no university obligations.
You’re right, this is a good conversation. Super interesting to read how we all manage to stay in touch with these creatures we refuse to give up. Cannot help thinking there must be more to this story.
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I lived with mine for nearly 10 years. You’d think you would save money, but in reality, his other clients repeatedly talked him into taking cats/kittens, minis, hinnies and unsellable/unadoptable horses, each with a sob story attached, that cost way more than farrier bills for my three horses — even the ancient TB I fostered and refused to return to the rescue (I fell harder for him than any of my purpose-bought horses) that had foundered badly and needed glue-on plastic shoes, styrofoam pads and wedges changed every few days until we found a combination that relieved his pain.
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Hmm, this makes me wonder where the line is drawn. When you first said “lifestyle” I thought yeah, they are a lifestyle. They are a deliberate choice to live a particular lifestyle - not a glamorous one - but horses aren’t something you can pick up and set down. They live far longer than dogs, rival the cost of a mortgage and demand hours and hours of labor, of which just a meager few are actually spent in the saddle. It is wholly a labor of love. Emerson put it it best when he wrote “Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.” If that doesn’t describe a “lifestyle” I’m not sure what does.
But to your point about influencers and glossy magazines, that’s totally fair. There’s a sort of “glamour” to equestrianism that has taken hold in some ways. I’m sure that some of these people genuinely do have a passion for horses, but the image that Instagram and haute couture (hello Chanel) give riding is so trivializing as to not be a descriptor at all. There is no glamour in dragging arenas, mucking stalls, picking hooves and shoving tubes of wormer into horses’ mouths. Most people I have taken riding physically recoil when I stick my fingers in the horse’s mouth to put the bridle on - something I’ve never thought twice about. It’s not sexy to have the grime of sweat, mud, manure and urine caked in and around your fingers, sometimes so deeply that no amount of scrubbing seems to make it budge and don’t even pretend like even your best white show breeches that you only pull out 10 minutes before you get on and come off immediately afterwards don’t have stains on them.
I don’t mean to belittle people who are fortunate enough to participate in such an “easy” way, leaving all the dirty work to everyone else, but it’s far from an accurate representation of the “lifestyle” choice that the vast majority of us make to keep horses in our lives.
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I hear you and I’m still struggling with “lifestyle.” I’m old enough to remember the early 1990s when my then 70-something closeted gay father found a partner and gossipy people (not our friends) described him as “choosing the gay lifestyle.” Though this relationship embodied an open secret, my dad, born in 1924 never could be out, despite the fact that his partner was and they shared a home until my dad died in 2014.
Lifestyle implies a choice, yes? And yes, Emerson’s passion" is a romantic notion for sure and it approaches where I am, helpless before it, etc.
Maybe I feel like LGBTQ+ people did for so long when they replied to the sort of comment my dad’s critics offered along the lines of, “Do you think I would suffer the consequences of rejecting societal norms, violence, discrimination, personal pain [horse version: work so long, be so dirty all the time, eat sand regularly, break bones, age prematurely, have permanent hoof marks on my quadriceps, have no money for anything else, etc.] if I had a choice?”
Truth be told, if I could do my university career over, I would work to gather archaeological evidence that we have co-existed cheek by jowl with horses for more than 35,000 years (the latest dating of the Chauvet Cave paintings) and that our respective species have selected for this link. We have all the cultural signs; now we need the data.
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I work 3 jobs
Basically always working - that’s my cash flow…
My sale horses flips always help with savings and paying off debt.
Can you flip a horse?
I have to make choices.
What I blow in hay money is what my friends are spending on bar tabs.
I try to keep monthly payments low.
I try really hard to cut out stupid spending like can I go 1 day without swiping my debit card? Can I eat the bag lunch instead of fast food? Sadly those things add up.
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I grew up riding, fox hunting and showing. My family had its own farm, bred horses and my mom taught. I had many ponies and horses, and bought my own after I finished school and had a ‘real’ job. Since I competed so much as a junior, I think the ‘thrill’ of competition waned at some point. I loved the education side of it more than the competition side, but still competed once a month or so.
I ended up retiring my horse, and after decades of riding, moved overseas. I dabbled in it when I came to this country, but really got into traveling and exploring (on a shoestring). My boy coliced and had to be put down a couple of years ago. He had a long life and a great retirement. But, the absolute relief I feel now, not having to pay board, vet bills, farrier visits, etc etc is something I didn’t expect.
I miss it, but I cannot fathom doing it again. Maybe I’ll lease a polo pony and take polo lessons. But no, I will not buy a horse again. I look at the prices of horses, board, saddles, etc etc in the US and my jaw drops. Before I moved, it was still affordable (using that term loosely), but everything seems to have hit some sort of exponential curve in the last year or so.
This is coming from someone who was entrenched in horses since I was 2. Passion, priorities, lifestyle, all of it described me. I know how lucky I was to grow up how I did, and to continue it into adulthood (or, second childhood, :)) I have made the choice to be on the sidelines and spectate. I still love it, but I cannot be a horse owner anymore.
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It’s not just money - it’s time. I have no idea how I’d manage without a very flexible job that I can mostly schedule to accommodate horse things. I end up working more or less whenever I’m not riding, 7 days a week, but it means I can meet the farrier, beat the storm, and haul out to take a fancy pants dressage lesson on a weekday.
As for an SO, I am firmly in the lucked out/converted camp. When I met my husband he saw that if he didn’t at least dip his toe into this world he’d never see me on weekends. He learned to ride a bit on my retired horse, bought us a wonderful riding trip in Spain for our wedding present, and … got hooked.
15 years later he has his own horse, is an avid fox hunter, and knows literally everyone in my eventing world due to his many years running SJ warmup at our horse trials. He never asks how much we spend and he never gripes about time at the barn. It’s beautiful!
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It’s a wonderful sport even if you don’t ride bc it’s pretty well inclusive if you actively volunteer!
And the cast of characters when you get to know them is vastly entertaining.
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