{"id":2753,"date":"2026-09-03T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/?p=2753"},"modified":"2026-08-28T12:17:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T17:17:41","slug":"the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for","title":{"rendered":"The Hobby I Used to Apologize For"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For about ten years I had a sentence ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It came out somewhere in the second hour of a first date, usually after she&#8217;d said something about hiking or her sister&#8217;s wedding, and it went: <em>&#8220;I mean, I game a little. Not like, seriously. Just to unwind.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every word in that sentence was doing damage control. &#8220;A little&#8221; was a lie. &#8220;Not seriously&#8221; was a bigger one. &#8220;Just to unwind&#8221; was there to file the whole thing under the same heading as a glass of wine, so that it would sound like a thing I did instead of a thing I was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had rehearsed that sentence. I want to be clear about that, because I think a lot of people reading this have one too and have never said out loud that they wrote it in advance. I had thought about the wording. I had a version for coworkers and a slightly braver version for dates. I had, functionally, a media strategy for my own weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What it actually costs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The obvious cost is that you spend an evening being a slightly fake person. That one&#8217;s fine, honestly. Everyone&#8217;s a little fake on a first date. Nobody leads with their sleep schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The real cost is downstream and it took me years to see it. When you pre-apologize for something, you teach the person across the table how to feel about it. You hand them the frame. You say &#8220;not seriously&#8221; and they hear &#8220;this is a minor thing that will presumably shrink over time,&#8221; and then six months later when it hasn&#8217;t shrunk \u2014 because it was never going to, because it&#8217;s not a phase, because it&#8217;s how I&#8217;ve relaxed since I was eleven \u2014 they&#8217;re not being unreasonable when they&#8217;re confused. They&#8217;re working off the spec I gave them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then you&#8217;re in a negotiation. Not about hours, though it always sounds like hours. About whether the thing you actually are is acceptable, conducted in installments, forever, at increasing volume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have talked to a lot of our members over thirteen years. That negotiation is the single most common story I hear. Not &#8220;my ex hated games.&#8221; That&#8217;s rare. The common one is: <em>I spent three years slowly explaining myself to someone who was fine with it in principle, and I got tired.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The phone call<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People know the founding story by now \u2014 Pat called me from Hawaii, late, on a Tuesday. What people usually quote is the exchange itself. &#8220;You said you could make a dating site for gamers, right?&#8221; &#8220;Yeah. I&#8217;ll need your help, but yes \u2014 we can do it.&#8221; &#8220;Alright. We&#8217;re doing it then.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I remember more clearly is what we didn&#8217;t have to say. Pat was on a Marine base four thousand miles away and I was grading papers in Georgia and neither of us had to explain to the other one why this was a problem worth eight years of nights. We both had the rehearsed sentence. We both knew exactly what the other one meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The line I keep coming back to, and it&#8217;s the one I actually wrote down at the time: we wanted to give other people <em>a clean, tasteful dating site for mature gamers<\/em> \u2014 the thing neither of us had. Not a filter. Not an interest tag on a mainstream app that lets you flag it like a dietary restriction. A place where the whole premise is settled before anyone types a word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I gave up things for it that I&#8217;m still occasionally annoyed about. Two coaching jobs, one of them varsity boys basketball, which if you know me is not a small thing. An invitation to teach a higher-level curriculum, which as a young non-tenured teacher was somewhere between unwise and career suicide. I said &#8220;sorry boss, I have other work to do&#8221; more than once and meant something I couldn&#8217;t explain to the boss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;She&#8217;s cool with it&#8221; is the lowest bar in the world<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve changed my mind about, and it took the research to get me there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For a long time I thought the goal was finding someone who didn&#8217;t mind. That&#8217;s the bar I was aiming at in my twenties: a person who wouldn&#8217;t make it a thing. Tolerance. I would have taken tolerance and been grateful for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tolerance is a truce. Truces require enforcement, and enforcement is exhausting, and the person doing the enforcing eventually gets tired too. Every couple I know who ran on tolerance ran out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The thing on the other side of it doesn&#8217;t have a great name. It&#8217;s not &#8220;she plays too,&#8221; although that helps. It&#8217;s closer to: the hobby is not an item on the agenda. Nobody&#8217;s tracking it. It never comes up as a topic because it isn&#8217;t a topic, the same way nobody&#8217;s partner has a standing objection to their taste in books. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/gaming-acceptance-not-hours\">The research calls it acceptance<\/a>, and when I read that word in a paper I recognized it immediately as the thing I&#8217;d spent a decade not knowing how to ask for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had been optimizing for &#8220;won&#8217;t be a problem.&#8221; The thing worth wanting is &#8220;isn&#8217;t a subject.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What we built instead<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">LFGdating is, structurally, one idea: remove the disclosure. That&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s the whole product thesis under the profiles and the messaging and thirteen years of me answering support email from my personal address at eleven at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If everybody on the site already plays, then nobody has to introduce it. Nobody writes the rehearsed sentence. Nobody spends the first date establishing that they are a normal adult who also does this. You get to skip straight to the part where you find out whether you actually like each other, which \u2014 and I say this as someone who spent his twenties on the other kind of site \u2014 is a shockingly large head start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We opened the beta in January 2012 and launched properly in February 2013. Thirteen years. In that time I have watched a lot of dating products decide that &#8220;gamer&#8221; is a growth segment and bolt an interest tag onto something that was never built for it. That&#8217;s a filter. A filter tells you the other person tolerates it. It cannot tell you they&#8217;re glad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The version of this I want for you<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m not going to tell you that a relationship fixes anything, or that finding a player two is the answer to any question larger than &#8220;who am I spending Saturday with.&#8221; It isn&#8217;t. That&#8217;s a different kind of blog and I&#8217;d rather not run one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I&#8217;ll say is narrower and I think it&#8217;s true: you shouldn&#8217;t have to have a sentence ready. The rehearsed thing, the wince, the &#8220;not seriously&#8221; \u2014 that&#8217;s a tax you&#8217;ve been paying so long you probably don&#8217;t notice you&#8217;re paying it, and it is not a required cost of being an adult who plays video games. There are, at last count, a couple hundred million Americans doing this every week. The stigma is running on fumes and inertia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Delete the sentence. If you want a place where it was never going to come up in the first place, <a href=\"https:\/\/lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-app.php\">the LFGdating app<\/a> is free on iOS and Android, and Pat and I are still the ones reading the support email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Stay classy,<br>Casey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For about ten years Casey had a sentence rehearsed for admitting he played video games. Here is what pre-apologizing for your own hobby costs you, and the thing the research changed his mind about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[671,3,480],"tags":[96,411,673,57,875,648,331],"class_list":["post-2753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-founders","category-gamer-dating","category-lfgdating","tag-dating-a-gamer","tag-dating-advice","tag-founder-story","tag-gamer-dating-site","tag-gamer-stigma","tag-gaming-and-relationships","tag-lfgdating"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Hobby I Used to Apologize For<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For ten years I had a rehearsed sentence for admitting I played video games. Here is why we built a site where nobody needs one.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I had a rehearsed sentence\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&quot;I mean, I game a little. Not seriously.&quot; Every word in that sentence was damage control. On the tax of pre-apologizing for yourself.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Gamer Dating Blog | LFGdating.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-03T12:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.lfgdating.com\/gamer-dating-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/featured-the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for-1024x539.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"539\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Casey (cw) Tebo (cw)\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Casey (cw) Tebo (cw)\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Casey (cw) Tebo (cw)\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/6bbc0e4c260f5d1e77411115a57bed80\"},\"headline\":\"The Hobby I Used to Apologize For\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-03T12:00:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for\"},\"wordCount\":1218,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/featured-the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for.png\",\"keywords\":[\"Dating a Gamer\",\"Dating Advice\",\"founder story\",\"Gamer Dating Site\",\"gamer stigma\",\"gaming and relationships\",\"LFGdating\"],\"articleSection\":[\"From the Founders\",\"Gamer Dating\",\"LFGdating\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for\",\"name\":\"The Hobby I Used to Apologize For\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/featured-the-hobby-i-used-to-apologize-for.png\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-03T12:00:00+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.lfgdating.com\\\/gamer-dating-blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/6bbc0e4c260f5d1e77411115a57bed80\"},\"description\":\"For ten years I had a rehearsed sentence for admitting I played video games. 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