The Double Edged Sword of Sharing Interests With Someone

Article • 684 Words • Relationships, 2025 • 12/27/2025

Background

The relationship advice hivemind has roughly settled into an idea that this Redditor summed up pretty well:

“Common interests are important in that they’re a way for you to spend time together and can fuel your conversations.

I also think it’s important to have some separate interests and activities so that you don’t become one blob of a person.”

- u/bjankles on r/AskMen

For what it’s worth, I also generally believe it as well, but with some small caveats because I think it is a bit nuanced of a topic.

Appreciating Things Differently Or For Different Reasons

If you are a movie lover you will inevitably come across someone who is an even bigger cinephile who has watched more than you and might also have deeper technical knowledge than you. They could be outright an asshole and make you feel bad about that, or you could also unconsciously compare yourself to them and feel bad for your lack of knowledge.

This highlights the first kind of complicating factor of interests. The shape of your interest or knowledge is different.

• Liking different things within a larger interest
  • Ex: slice of life versus romance anime
    • You have a frame of reference to talk about the things that you like without judgement but are exposed to different things that you wouldn’t normally encounter/seek out.
• Being interested in something for different reasons
  • Ex: liking music for beeps and boops versus love of instruments
    • You like the same thing but may lack some shared language to talk about it.

You can adapt of sort of evangelical mindset trying to win over the other person to seeing things from your side, or liking things for the same reason you like it. I think this is some kind of subconscious urge for synchronicity or team-building or something. This can be done in a healthy way, but in general someone doesn’t have to like something in the same way that you do.

Comparing Yourself to Someone Else With Shared Interest

If you are close with someone and they are doing something that is close enough to you, it becomes much easier to start comparing yourself to them. There are also a couple of other possibilities that increase the chances of bad energy being created by sharing an interest with someone.

Risk Conditions:

• Friends, partners, or close family
• Same or similar career/line of work
• Same or similar hobbies, interests, side hustles, etc.
• Propensity to compare yourself to others
• Low self-esteem
• Competitive personality
• Differing levels of aptitude
  • If you start an interest later than someone or because of them, you will be worse than them for awhile, maybe forever.
  • You may never really appreciate it if you don’t have the ability.
• Objective measures of aptitude
  • Some hobbies/interests, like chess or dance, have more objective measures of mastery/skill which can make it easy to compare to someone else as well.

Potential Thoughts:

• I am jealous of their success
  • I wish that was me
  • They don’t deserve that
• Why not me?
  • Am I bad at this?
  • Are they that much better than me at this?
• I’m dumb/not appreciating this in the right way
  • I’ll never get better at this

Conclusion

You don’t have to have shared interests.

• Relationships Are About Sharing Life
  • There is something that is really appealing about sharing your interests. However, you can share your interest without them having to share your love for it. If you love crafting and your partner is ambivalent about it, they can join you for a planned crafting session without picking up crochet on their own.
• It’s more about willingness and ability to meet you in the middle.
  • If you really like swimming, you probably shouldn’t be with someone who has a fear of water.

If you do have or develop shared interests, have an open dialogue about being able to enjoy things for your own reasons.

• You should be able to talk about why you like something, but not try to win over the other person.
• The last thing you want is for resentment to build over something that you used to share and like.