Topic says it all. My now ex wife hated my pinball collection. It started when she bought me an EM for Christmas, and after I caught pinball fever (over time) it grew to around 15 games. She actually would play sometimes and liked pinball in a small way. She finally banned them from the house... I had even put one in a conservatory I built, but I was worried about the UV and heat so I kept it covered.
She put her foot down and said that I was allowed *one* pinball in the house. I had to get rid of the rest or find another solution. She wouldn’t budge. Now we had a large home. No garage, but 4 bedrooms and a basement. She says all the rooms are needed for kids and an ‘office’. Pfffft... kids... working from home. I owned 1/2 the house, so shouldn’t I get a room of my own? Apparently not.
I considered renting a shop or workshop with power and putting them there, I actually paid for shop space and stored some at a storage facility for a year to try and keep her happy. Didn’t really work- for me. Too much trouble, why own them if I couldn’t play them when I wanted?
Anyways, the games (all but my LoTR LE) finally went down into a basement ‘games room’ (not light work). I was not too happy about it as there was some minor damp down there. Not good. I had some nice titles, too. TZ, AFM,RFM,... you get the picture.
Long story short, married life didn’t last much longer after that. It didn’t help that I sold the only game she had bought for me (my only EM) and it never made it into the basement ‘games room’. Trouble was- during the divorce she wanted 1/2 the ‘market value’ of all the games I had personally paid for and that she had expressed little interest in util then. Of course market value to her meant the *most* that title had ever sold for. In the end I was still on the hook for paying around $20K+ (1/2 the final valuation) after haggling though lawyers about the actual market value.
I even threatened to sell them (give them away) in a ‘fire sale’ and just give her 1/2 of whatever I got. Couldn’t bring myself to do that just to prove a point about ‘actual market value of a collection at a single moment in time‘ - so in the end I paid twice just to keep my own collection intact. And I also had to pallet them and pay to ship them 3,000 miles.
It reminds me of the scene in the John Cusack film ‘High Fidelity’ where Rob goes to look at a vinyl record collection for sale and just can’t buy it because one unicorn record is worth 10x what the girlfriend asking... great film if you haven’t seen it. But I digress.
My new wife lets me keep my games in the living room. And in a shed I built for the ones that won’t fit. Some guys never learn. ‘My name is Richard and I’m a pinball collector”.