How do others in your life view/experience your “relationship” with tea?

My wife shows up at my office today and walked in just in time to catch me deeply sniffing an empty pot full of wet leaves. She said, “I’m not even going to ask.” Pretty well sums up family attitude.

Well, anyone who knows me at all knows of my passion for tea (especially since I used to own a company).

It is an endless source of teasing from my family, because while they do know about my passion for tea, they don’t necessarily understand why I love it so much. But, even though they do tease, it is harmless, and they do support my adoration for tea. They sometimes think it’s weird how excited I get over the smell of tea leaves, or simply receiving tea in the mail or just going into a tea shop. They don’t “get it” but they accept it.

Since my wife has the whole Japanese Tea Ceremony credentials and understands the value of teas, it makes my life real easy. If I say, "i’m going to spend $300+ dollars on some FF Darjeeling teas, " her simple reply would be “Ok.” She can taste the difference between a really good Darjeeling, and a great Darjeeling. She makes me a cup of great green tea in the morning, I make her a cup of great Darjeeling in the evening. After especially greasy meals, then I reach for the Oolongs for both of us to drink.

My family gets my tea habit better than they understand my fountain pen habit. They just think I’m growing up more. My boyfriend likes my tea habit and has been developing a small one of his own. My friends think I’m weird, but by now they just understand that I am who I am. One of my friends is into tea too. We are rooming this year and we are going to indulge together.

Let’s see. Mum thinks it stains my teeth and messes with my hormones. Dad indulges me, occasionally drinking whatever I choose to steep.
My friends look at me strangely, and tolerate a few words about tea here and there… but once someone knows I am “that” obssessed, anything tea related tends to get a bemused and distant nod.
I do have one friend who is into tea but has such odd tastes that I can’t even relate (He steeps it until it’s gone super bitter, and cold. I don’t get it!) and the tea I love, he generally dislikes. It frustrates me because I feel as if we should be able to talk about it, but just can’t! -it doesn’t help that he states opinion as fact, regardless of others.
I digress…
My other good friend who tolerates my tea habit has agreed to try one tea per month. Considering he hates tea, and loooooooves coffee, for him, that is huge!! I’m making him try Jungle Ju Ju next… I have this fantasy that it will turn into his gateway tea haha

My wife rolled her eyes a bit at first…but then she tasted something, I forget what, and it was all over for her. It quickly turned into a massive collection of her teas, my teas, and our teas.

At first, my mother in law mocked me for it, but she can be a good sport about it sometimes, willing to try whatever I’ve got in the fridge. My father in law is just eager to try anything new.

My mother tries to be supportive, but really just doesn’t understand it at all. And she is utterly terrified that some customs agent is going to pound down my door, convinced that the tea being shipped to me is pot. >.<. As in, every time I discuss getting tea from the States, she warns me.

But recently, I got a bit of a confidence bolster in my tea-love. My little brother has long enjoyed various bagged teas from the grocery store, so when I visited him recently, I brought him a bag of 20 or so looseleaf teas and one of my old DavidsTea perfect mugs (It was a logo mug with “DavidsTea” on it, and my brother’s name is David!). He was blown away by the gift, he loved it. Bragged about it and everything. We had stopped in to stay the night at his place on the way home from Tennessee. We only live about an hour and a half away from him, and by the time we got home the next day, he and his fiancee had already put together a $115 order with DavidsTea. It cracked me up and really makes me happy that this is something we can share, that we can message each other out of the blue and have a really good conversation about tea.

I am absolutely loving all of these stories; I feel honored to be given these small glimpses into your tea lives.

I’ll offer up another one.

A few of my nieces and nephews know I drink lots of tea. I recently told the youngest how it makes you need to use the restroom a lot. So now when we’re all playing together and I get up and head to the restroom, they look at me questioningly, (especially if I just went 15 minutes ago), and I simply say, “You know me?!” and then the youngest one perks up and says, “Uh, huh. Drink tea, gotta pee!”

It also makes watching movies at home interesting. When I have been drinking tea all night, I literally have to go every 15 minutes, to the point that I can almost set my watch by it. Luckily, I don’t go out to the movies very often anymore (way too expensive). And, my wife is patient. :)

My family has come around to the fact that I prefer tea over coffee. Or rather, my aunt has. She did do her fair bit of teasing earlier, and as she has a small tendency to play pranks once in a while, it did get slightly annoying. Like when she bought a box of the cheapest most horrid teabags she could find, cut them all up and emptied them into a different bag and tried to pass it off as a super-special very expensive tea. I thought it was odd at the time that it was so special and there still wasn’t any info about it, but I trusted her so I didn’t cotton on and tried desperately to find something polite to say about it other than the fact that it was really bland and asphalted my cup on the inside with tannins. Yeah, naive of me, I know.

Anyway, they’ve got used to it, I think especially after they’ve figured out that I’ll still drink whichever cheap bag they give me without protesting and am not expecting them to go out and buy something ‘proper’.

My father is an entirely different story. He hates tea. Hates it. He’s got the same relationship with it that I’ve got with beer. The most vile substance on the planet. Even getting some on the fingers is cause for immediate handwashing.

He is, however, into whisky. We may not like each other’s beverage of interest but we totally understand each other. He’s the one who taught me the very simple truth about detecting notes of this and that in the cup. “If one person can taste it, then it’s there. It doesn’t matter if everybody else can’t find it, because they can’t taste with his tongue. Flavour is not something that can be discussed, debated or compromised upon.”

My mother likes tea but she doesn’t have it a lot and she’s perfectly fine with whatever supermarket brands are available. I find it ironic and amusing that my dad, who absolutely abhors the stuff, is the one to keep nagging me about bringing some tea up that I can have when I’m there, but that’s the whisky enthusiast in him again. He’s fine giving it to my mother because she doesn’t care, but it bothers him to give it to me when he knows it’s not to my actual taste.

The boyfriend, well, he deals with it. When I met him he had teabags and was dismayed that you just can’t get Twinings bagged LS here. Or any other brand of LS in bags in supermarkets. He used to bring some home with him every time he had been in the UK. I proceeded to introduce him to A C Perch’s and the world of loose leaf. These days he only have teabags at work and had even amassed a small collection of his own when we moved in together. He teases me a little about it, but mostly in the ’you’ll need more tins’ or ’we’ll need a new shelf’ kind of way. Purchase-wise, we have separate accounts so I can pretty much do whatever I want with my money. Like he does with his. (He’s far more likely to mock me after an Amazon-avaganza order and piles of new books start to arrive…)

My husband and I started drinking loose leaf at the same time, but I’m a lot more obsessed with it. He doesn’t really have a palate for the finer stuff, but enjoys the fact that I pick out wonderful tea for the house.

Friends and family have yet to make me feel silly about my drink preference. I’ve gifted tea to them before (if I know they drink it) and they appreciate my selections. Really I’ve only met one person that felt oddly about tea, because he always imagined old ladies drinking it out of lil tea cups. :P After serving him tea a few times, I think he’s gotten over that stigma. I think when friends and family accept that tea is just a tasty hot beverage, they become a lot less annoying to talk to.

Angrboda has a very good point by comparing the love of tea with the love or interest in wines! I’m going to have to use that sometime :)

My boyfriend thinks I’m a little nutso but he’s 100% supportive. Plus I’m slowly converting him. He used to think tea tasted like hot water, but after some Buttered Rum he was a little bit changed!

My problem person is one of my best friends, J. He drinks 4-5 extra large Tim Hortons double doubles a day. (just a note: extra large is NOT as big in Canadian Tims as it is in US Tims, but it’s still a lot of coff-eine haha). He thinks tea is digusting and that I am pretentious because I drink it. To the point of loudly making fun of me. Did I say best friend? Nevermind.