Letters to the Editor
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Another approach
My sweet, understanding, emotionally engaged husband has a major music jones. It takes up an enormous amount of his time and attention, and space in our apartment. His passion for it (and his other interests) was a big attractor when we met. He gives me room to do the things I like to do, even when he finds them silly or beneath the likes of an ivy-educated super-duper-ambitious pseudointellectual professional. He was also a 42-year-old bachelor when we met, and was quite reluctant to get married, although not to commit. I managed to persuade him to do so, after 3 years of dating, based on the same arguments our gay friends offer when explaining why they want to marry. I give him a lot of credit for overcoming his basic revulsion for the bourgeois institution of marriage. It helped that we planned the whole thing in three weeks and my dress came from Loehmann's.
Most of your dilemma does not appear to be one for me.
However, I'm not crazy about the neanderthal, racist attitudes of your husband's motorcycle friends, although he doesn't seem to share them. If he did, that would be a deal-breaker for me. I don't like the idea of my kids being exposed to those attitudes routinely in the chosen company of their stepfather. But what concerns me is the danger he faces, and what that can do to your family. As a confirmed bachelor, he needed to consider his effect on the people he was drawing legally and presumably forever, into his life. It doesn't sound like he did that. What if he is in an awful crash? Is it fair to ask your children to reduce their academic or life ambitions -- or desire for YOUR time and attention -- if all of your disposable income and much of your concern and emotional energy goes toward his nursing care? I don't know what I would have done -- I didn't experience your heady exuberance at meeting him. I do know that when you have kids (as I do), they have to come first. Only you can figure out what that means, but it is hard to see how introducing that level of unasked-for risk is fair to them.