When I saw Dan on a dating app – bearded and blue-eyed, he shared my penchant for fancy bicycles and rescue mutts – I nearly broke my finger swiping right. We met in person at Shubie Park, a crosshatch of trails near my home in Halifax, Canada, and quickly fell into step, chatting easily, agreeing fulfilment was more important than money, and that Seinfeld was the greatest show of all time. Any differences felt complementary.
Months later, we made it official. ‘I couldn’t have found a better match if I ordered him from a catalogue!’ I bragged to anyone who would listen. We waltzed through the traditional markers of a relationship: moving in together and getting engaged in the park where we first met. We started to plan our wedding.
Then, three years in, Dan started a hobby that threatened to change everything. He signed up for a firearms safety course so he could apply for a gun licence.
‘You’re what?’
‘I’ve always been into guns. I grew up with them.’
My throat tightened; my heart constricted. My custom partner had a defect.
I’m so Left-leaning, I break the scales. I wouldn’t vote Conservative if my own mother ran for office on the party ticket. When school shootings in the United States were broadcast into my childhood living room, I was grateful to live in Canada, with its strict gun controls. I hated that my dad hunted moose. I pushed the resulting roast around my plate, teary-eyed, filling up on bread and potatoes. Could I really marry a man who loved guns?
What was worst, like all of Dan’s hobbies, he began pursuing his interest in guns obsessively. His main passion became restoring antique military firearms, but he also dabbled in handguns and other weapons. He would spend hours on CanadianGunNutz.com, learning everything he could about spring preloads, scope magnification ratios and barrel profiles, and he’d go to the range every weekend, bringing home targets of human outlines peppered with holes. He also collected wheel weights from local garages to melt down, learning to cast and fill his own bullets.
Perhaps firearms would join previous passions, his gun lockers gathering dust, hinges rusting from disuse
Long, narrow packages started arriving at our doorstep with alarming regularity. I’d sign for them with pursed lips and a pit in my stomach. When he got home from work, Dan would go taut with excitement like a child on Christmas morning.
‘Nice! My new gun came!’
‘You need to give me a heads up when these things are coming. And how many do you need anyway? How many do you already have?’
Another type of tension filled him then: defensiveness.
Previous passions had ruled Dan’s life for a hot second – candle-making, backyard blacksmithing, 3D printing – before fading into funny anecdotes. Perhaps firearms would join them, his gun lockers gathering dust, hinges rusting from disuse. I would (soon, I hoped) relay my short-lived fears at dinner parties, hamming up my anxiety that my partner might join the alt-Right.
I cycled through the first four stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression – determined to reach acceptance. Dan had shown such support for my interests, cheering me on at Dragon Boat races, listening to me go on about my half-baked climate change sci-fi novel. He was the love of my life; I wasn’t going to let guns destroy that. Finally, after exhausting every coping mechanism in my arsenal, I tried honesty and vulnerability on for size.
‘Dan, I’m not comfortable with all this gun stuff.’
‘Maybe you could come to the range with me. See what it’s all about.’
Dan whistled and I clenched my teeth as he drove us to the outskirts of an industrial park 10 minutes away. I followed him into the range, swallowing as he waved to the smiling man behind the bullet-filled counter and strode past the taxidermy deer heads and matte-black weapons through a heavy metal door. The acrid scent of burnt gunpowder flooded my nose.
Dan unzipped his gun-carrying case. He nestled behind me as if he was teaching me how to swing a golf club. ‘It’s all about focus and breath,’ he explained. ‘The best time to pull the trigger is between your exhale and your next inhale.’
I chuckled half-heartedly. ‘Kinda like meditation.’
‘Totally. I find it’s good for mindfulness.’
I shook my head. My extroversion wilted in this place where Dan thrived
I felt my lungs burn for another breath as I looked through the wavering scope, lined up, and pulled the trigger. The reverb shook me against my husband’s frame.
‘Amazing shot, babe! You’re a natural. You want to try on your own?’
I shook my head, uncharacteristically silent. My extroversion wilted in this place where Dan thrived. Plaster on a brave face and fake it ’til yah make it, Lindsey.
‘It’s not for me, but I get why you like it.’
He kissed my forehead. ‘Thanks for supporting me.’
Later, at home, he showed me a photo of himself at six years old holding a BB gun in his family’s blaze-red blueberry field. The autumnal expanse made him look even smaller.
‘I stopped target shooting as a teenager. Spending time with Dad took a backseat to video games and online chat rooms.’ He shook his head at his youthful folly.
This wasn’t a foray into something new, I realised then. It was a homecoming.
Dan’s passion turned into a bonfire, engulfing all his free time. He started a YouTube channel, the Maritime Marksman, and I tried to broadcast a pride I didn’t fully feel. I’d reached a tenuous peace treaty with myself: to keep my man, I would accept this new hobby. I shared videos of him shooting cans of baked beans with a British Pattern 14 Enfield and bottles of Dijon mustard with a French Berthier, as if daring my socialist hippie friends to comment. Whether due to disinterest or avoidance, no one did.
Then, in the early months of COVID-19, as we all hunkered down in our homes – stir crazy, scared and glued to the daily provincial government updates – the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history occurred near our home. A man drove about 200 kilometres along backroads and major highways in a mock cop car with illegal guns, barging into homes and picking off pedestrians – killing 22 and injuring three more – until he was shot and killed by the police.
I snuck down to the basement and texted my friend a photo of the guns locked in their display case on the wall. Like, why does he need these? Why does he have so many?
How well did I know this man I met online anyway, who’d been so anxious, he confessed to me, that he homeschooled in Grade 10, who suffered depression into his 20s? Could he do something like the gun man? My own anxiety was compounded by COVID and the shooting, and anything seemed possible – anything bad anyway.
It’s like how carpenters want state-of-the-art tools. Marksmen want the best guns
I worked up the nerve to ask Dan some more questions. ‘I get the old war guns, but why do you have assault rifles downstairs?’
‘That’s a term the government made up to scare people.’
‘OK, so what are they, and why do you have them?’
‘Mostly semi-automatics. It means it has a mechanism to automatically load a new round of cartridge.’ He thought before answering my second question. ‘I guess it’s like how chefs want the best knives or carpenters want state-of-the-art tools. Marksmen want the best guns.’
I thought of our dozen high-end bicycles one room over: the Chromag mountain bike with electronic shifting and adjustable suspension, and the Italian Tommasini roadie handmade from steel. It was a reasonable answer. I tried to tamp down my fears and forge ahead.
A few days later, Dan was shooting cans in the unfinished section of our basement, plastic pellets ricocheting harmlessly off the walls. I knocked.
‘Safe to come in?’
‘Yup!’
I made my way to the deepfreeze, for ingredients for one of my weird COVID concoctions, a remedy for my boredom and the grocery-store restrictions.
‘Wanna join me?’ he asked.
‘Sure…’ I tried to sound chipper, looking longingly towards the freezer. I took the rifle, emptied my lungs and took aim, like he taught me. But the cans were blurry; my hands were trembling.
‘I… gasp... can’t… gasp… I’m… gasp… sorry.’
Dan wrapped his arms around me. ‘Sweetie, it’s OK. You don’t have to.’
My tears soaked his T-shirt.
Years have passed. I hear peals of laughter as I tackle the New Yorker crossword in our camper while Dan and his father take aim at old pot lids and ladles suspended from a makeshift frame. The sounds of cocking rifles and high-pitched pings have become familiar, almost comforting. Tomorrow morning, father and son may go hunting again. I imagine them, guns slung over shoulders, their footsteps crunching through the frosted forest in the day’s first light, their breath misting.
After my basement meltdown, Dan kept his hobby quiet, not out of shame but respect. I filled pages dissecting my feelings and spoke to my therapist ad nauseam. In my heart, I knew Dan wasn’t dangerous, but my mind needed to catch up after a lifetime of opposition.
Guns can be used to harm and divide, but for Dan they are a tool for connection
I reflected on my exes who didn’t have guns, who were nonetheless unsafe: the man who beat in a bathroom stall door when he thought I was hooking up with someone else, the one who hid being a cocaine dealer until I was hooked on him. Then there were the men who were perfect on paper but wrong for me: the kind helicopter pilot, the witty folk musician. With everyone else, the connection always crashed and burned or fizzled out. What I had with Dan was rare, special, and worth fighting for.
While guns can be used to harm and divide, for Dan they are a tool for connection. In a world with an epidemic of male loneliness, I can’t see that as a bad thing. Sometimes, I accompany him on road trips to attend gun shows. En route home, we’ll stop at farm stands and scenic vistas, grab lunch and go thrifting. But, first, I saunter around the legion, one of the only women in a sea of men. There’s amiable ribbing with wide smiles. The smell of coffee and hotdogs wafts from the canteen, abuzz with laughter and excitement I so infrequently see from men. If the Nova Scotia gunman had had a community like this, I think to myself, maybe that tragedy would have been avoided.
My fellow Leftie writer friends have been won over too. They want Dan to take them shooting so they can write more authentic scenes. When the apocalypse happens, everyone jokes, they’ll come to our basement. I’ll recite poetry while Dan protects us with his firearms. We love and support each other’s disparate hobbies, which individually energise and fulfil us, and enrich the space and time we share. It was a long, hard battle, but I’ve finally won the war between my ears.
