Tips to effectively prep with a spouse who hates “preppers”.

This can be a challenge. Your significant other may be opposed to you prepping and that can hinder your goals, relationship and even your family life. This is a difficult subject but if handled properly something you can work around. Usually this comes down to two reasons. One, your spouse has a problem with prepping in general or two, the money you need to allocate for your preparations is an issue. Possibly both.

For starters if your spouse is not on the same page, rid yourself of every prepper related term. “Shtf”, “teotwawki”, “zombie apocalypse” or any other world ending scenario, is an uncomfortable conversation. Do not talk to your spouse or any normal person about these things. They don’t want to hear it. The conversation is uncomfortable and many non Preppers consider it to be an unrealistic and abnormal thing to worry about. Perhaps they are right. Chances are this is your problem with your spouse. You sound crazy. Your spouse doesn’t want to listen to you ramble on about why you have to spend all of your hard-earned money on a two-year supply of food to stave off a food shortage siege from an economic failure or some end all nuclear Holocaust. Stop. Not only are you going to make people think you are crazy, you might drive yourself there before you’re finished.

Go back to the basics and use basic terms. Normal topics people can easily relate to. Again, scratch the term ‘prepper” and “shtf” from your vocabulary when dealing with your spouse, maybe even entirely. People wont take you seriously. Disaster preparedness however is something every mom and dad look to cover and the guise of this may help you reach your goals.

The smallest of emergencies are worth preparing for, and every “normal” person would agree. So when trying to rise your spouse’s interest in disaster preparedness, talking about the possibility of a small emergency and how to protect your family may get them on the hook. It shouldn’t be hard to reel them in. Start off with the smallest of emergencies. Next time the power goes out for a few hours explain to your spouse that a few hours could easily have been an entire day. By God, the food would spoil! There goes $300 of food out the window. It sure would be worthwhile to have a generator on days like that to keep the fridge running. See, that makes sense to the average person, and your generator purchase probably then would have your spouse’s blessing.

In a case like that your spouse may have bit the worm and you can slowly reel him/her in. Explain that a power outage in the winter could result in a freezing cold night or two. Are there enough warm things in the home to cover a night without a primary heat Source? If not this is a great transition to suggest buying more cold weather gear, such as blankets and clothing rated for cold temperatures. This is a reasonable request to the average person. And it has them “prepping” without realizing it.

Every time The possibility of the small emergency arises chip away at your spouse. Does your spouse watch the local news? No matter where you reside in the USA, somewhere someone is getting laid off from work and it is usually covered by your local news. Explain to your spouse that you’re fearful something like that could happen to your own family. What if it took a while to find another job? No one wants to depend on family or friends for help. To most, this can be conveyed as a reasonable concern. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest saving money in the event of unemployment, or at the very least to start buying an additional reserve of canned goods. If your purchases begin modestly there is a greater chance of approval from your spouse.

If your spouse is still on board after reasonable suggestions like these, why not push for an alternative method to cook food? Sometime in your life (and your spouse’s), you more than likely had a power outage that lasted a few days or more. Probably from the weather. Relay your worries that it could happen again. If kids are involved the prospect of having a small gas stove and the additional fuel to warm up food during a long-term power outage should keep any parent comforted. It doesn’t have to be a storm either. Any natural disaster specific to your area (something that has happened locally), is an excellent talking point to open the door to purchase several disaster preparedness provisions.

And don’t look now but after these three small conversations we were able to get our spouse on board by agreeing to obtain backup power source (generator), backup cook-stove, cold weather gear and additional food Provisions. Chances are your spouse’s is on board now on some basic level, now and forever.

It’s not a bad idea to eternally ditch talking about end-of-the-world scenarios with your spouse or anyone else for that matter. Even if you believe with all of your heart that the zombie apocalypse is almost upon us, or that an Ice Age of Epic Proportions is coming in 2027, keep it to yourself. Censor it. Point being, anything you wish to buy for your ice apocalypse could most likely be warranted elsewhere through the very important guise of basic disaster preparedness.

Money issues may come into play. Most of us face budget constrictions and if stretched too thin arguments are almost guaranteed to happen. After all money is the number one argument for all couples world wide. If this is the case do not start with expensive projects. Do not even talk about them. As mentioned previously stick with the basics of disaster preparedness. Try to be as frugal as possible. Building a deeper food pantry could be as simple as buying a few additional canned goods during each trip to the super market.

We hope this article helps you to effectively break the ice with your spouse if need be. Has anyone else had an issue where they effectively persuaded a person to take an interest in disaster preparedness? If so we would like to hear about it. We are also working on a section in relation to financial preparedness which can tie into disaster preparedness rather nicely so stat tuned.