Priya’s parents visit twice a year, a long weekend in the spring and a longer stretch around the holidays, and somewhere in our first year or two together a habit got established that I’m not sure either of us actually chose on purpose: after dinner, a game comes out. It made sense at the start. Games are a genuine, central part of how we spend time together, and offering to share that with her parents felt like the obvious hospitable move rather than sitting around making small talk for three hours straight.

The problem, which took me embarrassingly long to actually register, is that her parents don’t especially like board games. They’re polite about it, genuinely warm people who’ll sit through 7 Wonders or Dominion without complaint, but I’ve started noticing the specific tells, the slightly longer pause before a turn, the question that reveals they’ve lost track of a rule I explained twenty minutes earlier and are too gracious to ask about again, the visible relief when I suggest we call it after one round instead of the usual two or three. I used to read that as a normal learning curve, the thing that happens with anyone new to this kind of game. I’ve come around to thinking it’s something else, a family being kind to their daughter’s partner about a hobby that just isn’t theirs.

What changed my mind, mostly, was watching her mother’s face light up over a completely different activity during the last visit, a jigsaw puzzle Priya had picked up on a whim, spread out on the dining table across three straight evenings, no rules to track, no turns to lose track of, everyone drifting over to add a few pieces whenever they felt like it. That was the most relaxed I’ve seen her parents at our place in years of visits, and it wasn’t a coincidence that it happened to be the one activity I hadn’t personally chosen or pushed.

I haven’t fully broken the habit yet. There’s still something in me that wants to share the actual center of my hobby with people I care about instead of finding a lower-stakes substitute, and I think that impulse is coming from a decent place even if the execution’s been a little selfish. But I bought a second puzzle before their next visit, and I’m trying to notice, in the moment this time instead of three visits later, when hospitality has quietly turned into me just wanting company for the thing I already wanted to do anyway.