Girlfriends and wifes, how do YOU cope?

I did not visit this thread for a while because I thought its title was meant to warn all men to keep off the premises: "how do YOU (read: wives, girlfriends) cope?" Aren't men earnestly requested to leave this forum to those poor women unfortunately related to some compulsive audio freak, instead of filling it with our own stories and ruses? We all well enough know what it is like to be an audiophilic husband or boyfriend--something in the nerves, in the heart, in the brain which has more to do with the love of sound than the love of woman, child and oneself.
Women, I was waiting in eagerness for things like: The first instinctive movement of these cowardly audiophilic creatures is to make a "cache," and hide their audio treasures in it. The first thing to do is to uncover their "cache" and find out what is in it. Then you can play the trick of throwing a remark at them on some mighty issue and either hit or miss their particular weakness of the moment.
(I had an ingenious girlfriend who would make a cunning practice out of asking thinks like: "Mullard has a nice colored box, don't they?" or "What's up with Temper Transfiguration these days?" to my astonishment, between remarks about the daily news. I don't deny that I felt a pang in these seemingly casual asides, yes, a stab, but there was also an entreaty, a sigh--that was particularly effective when I had the fever to upgrade. I actually put off buying a few article with remarks like these flashing through my conscience.)
Women, please make a few revelations relating especially to your audiophilic partner, just a few things such as women commonly never tell. Men, put your wives and girlfriend on this forum and leave the room. Perhaps you women do not know if you can trust us with them. (Men: shouldn't we like to hear them? No. We would love to hear them!) In any case, my respect goes to all the good, patient wives and girfriends of audiogoners! to their soft hands and pitying voices we must all come at last--with that sad, lost look we get when things break down and we are caught without a replacement...

Hi, my name is Margrit, and I have known "slawney" (my husband) for 10 years. He asked me to write something to you about how I cope with his audio interests, so here it goes. Usually, things go pretty well since he has his own listening room and listens pretty quietly, and I like the music he likes. The last time I had to cope with his audio hobby was when our cleaning woman accidentally plugged one of his American CD players into our German electric outlet. He was really upset when he came home from work and saw this, since the CD player didn't work. The poor cleaning woman did not want to admit that she had broken the CD player for fear of having to pay for it (she just wanted to listen to some CD of Polish music I got on my last trip to Poland, because our cleaning woman is Polish herself and is a little homesick), and there were moments when I thought Jay--oops, that is what I call him, he did not want me to tell you my nickname for him--suspected that I myself had broken his CD player and was not telling him (I like the Polish CD too and sometimes I do not know how to plug all of the components in the right way, since he has so many different colored cables, and changes the cables around on my little stereo and even my TV and VCR alot, for some reason...). One thing that acn get out of hand is when we are travelling around in Europe in a big city and Jay starts going record shopping. I can tell when he wants to do this when he takes out the hotel telephone directory and writes down the addresses of the record stores in town in his notebook and then starts to look at this long list of records that he keeps with him all the time. One way I cope with this is by asking him to give me a definite time when he will be finished shopping for records before he goes into the store. It also helps if there are some nice women's clothing stores or furniture stores that specialize in modern Italian furniture or lighting near the record store, because then I just go shopping myself. To conclude, I think Jay is a wonderful husband and I like that he has this audio hobby rather than some of the hobbies that some men in German have. I have to get back to my work now, so goodbye, it has been nice having the chance to write to you, Jay seems to spend alot of time lately on the computer, and I think he writes alot of things here.

Detlof, as an analyst, perhaps my answer to the question "girlfriends and wife, how do you cope?" will interest you because it relies on the difference between masculine and feminine attitudes towards listening pleasure. I can clarify this apropos of the psychoanalytic opposition between "enjoyment of drives" and "enjoyment of the other," since this opposition is sexualized. On the one hand, men follow the closed, ultimately solipsistic, circuit of drives which find their satisfaction in idiotic masturbatory (autoerotic) activity, in the perverse circulating around an object (e.g. a piece of music) as an object of drive. On the other hand, women are subjects for whom access to enjoyment is much more closely linked to the domain of other people's discourse, to how they not so much talk, as are talked about: say, musical pleasure hinges on the animated talk of the co-listener, on the satisfaction provided by speech itself and not just the act of listening in its infantile and onanistic stupidity. And does not this contrast explain the long-observed difference in how the two sexes relate to the "listening room"? Men are much more prone to use the listening room as a masturbatory device for their solitary listening immersed in stupid repetitive pleasures playing their records, while women are more prone to participate in chat in the listening room, using the listening room for exchanges of speech. There is another--more radical--point to be made here: namely, a "true woman" is defined by a certain radical act: the act of taking from man, her partner, of obliterating--even destroying--that which means everything to him, and which is more important to him than his own life, the precious treasure around which his life resolves. As the exemplary figure of such an act in my life, I will mention my previous fiance who, upon learning that I was involved with another woman, appropriated my Jadis amplifiers, my most precious possession at the time, and donated it to a Salvation Army store in Manhattan--it is in this horrible act of destroying that which matters most to her partner (whether through chat in the listening room, or through appropriating his most treasured component or recording) that a woman acts as a true woman and copes with her partner's way of enjoying himself.