June 18, 2012 No Comments

For those of you reading this blog who are men, living alone and do not have a family or friends that you enjoy spending time with, you live a entirely solo existence with no contact with the outside world………….this post is not for you.

I have taught a lot of survival classes and I have also attended many survival classes under the instruction of other teachers and there seems to be an underlying theme in the mindset of the folks who attend such things. That theme is that this survival/preparedness game is for men only. That is unfortunate. Today we will focus on helping your spouse and later in the week we will focus on helping your children get into survival practice.

While I will readily admit that there are some ladies out there who will resist and downright be upset by the thought of the survival/preparedness game. The vast majority of them have simply not had the opportunities to learn in an appropriate environment. The cold hard facts are this, if you are a man and you are prepping and studying survival methodology and you are not involving your loved ones out there, you are making a big mistake. You will have a hard choice to make when it comes time to actually put these skills to use, that is you will need to walk away from them and go-it alone and let them take care of themselves, or you will need to teach them then. If the prior is your plan, then stop reading now, because you are not worthy of my instruction. If the latter is your reason, then please listen to me now, and understand that you need to involve them NOW.

Ask yourself, do you have a “high-maintenance” spouse, does your spouse think “all this survival stuff is just silly”, does your spouse resist the idea of practicing these skills with you? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you have some work to do.

Let me help you, there are 3 easy things to do.

1. Start slow

Some suggestions would be to just practice how to clean water in a couple of hours, do some cooking over an open fire somewhere, or take a simple day hike and point out places to build shelter.

2. Make a trade

Trade a weekend of doing skills with you, for doing a weekend of whatever your spouse enjoys doing and suggest you do her weekend of stuff first so that you can you show commitment to the project. This may not be easy for you, please keep in mind doing the survival things is not going to be easy for her. Its a trade-off at its best.

3. Take the kitchen sink

Whenever you prep and practice your weekend of skills this should involve an overnight in somewhat uncomfortable surroundings. What I mean is that you cannot expect someone who is used to spending every night in bed and a hot shower the next morning, to simply go outside and lay down in the leaves and have bugs crawling on them. That tactic will not work, and will only cause problems if you ever try to go do it again. On the first few trips you need to take it all, a nice place to sleep, good pads, a cooler with drinks, maybe even find a nice campground with showers. What I am suggesting here is that you do something such as a car-camping trip so that the transition is not so hard.

So there you have three basic steps to getting your spouse, girlfriend, fiance’, significant other, going on such trips. For you ladies out there who are the survivalist of the family, I certainly mean no disrespect. My observations over many years is that you are far and few between, but I do know you are out there. So keep up the good work and get that man out there!

Until then, I hope to see you on, or off the trail.