This is the one job that I'm sure 90% of all horse husbands have had. This is also the only job where you can play a role in your partner's horse activities, while remaining completetly detached from those activities. You just drive her to the right place at the right time, and either leave to do something else while she rides, or you sit with a book or a video game and wait. For some horse husbands, this is where their career starts and ends. They consider this their contribution, and have no interest beyond that. For some women, this is an ideal situation. They get a lift to the barn, but riding remains their 'thing'. They can tell their friends that their partner 'is supportive, and understands'.

In the beginning, this was the case for me too. My paying job consumed much of my time and energy, so I was comfortable to leave horses outside of my personal world, at least for a while. While she was slaying serpentines in the arena, I was slaying monsters on my Nintendo in the lounge. I'd look up every so often to see how it was going, but for the most part I was just a casual observer.

I don't really remember when this started to change, I just found myself watching more of the lessons, and I began to pick up on some of the terminology. "Inside rein", "Lead change", "Shoulder in". I would always attempt to first decipher the meaning of these terms by watching how she did them, and then if I was still stumped, I would ask in the car on the way home. She was glad that I was interested, as I was able to provide additional feedback on how the lesson went. "How were my legs?" and "Did I lift my hands?" were the typical starting points of our post-lesson debriefing.