You Know You're Dating A Coaster Enthusiast When

You have no idea how it happened. You thought, this person is nice, then suddenly you're in a fully fledged relationship with no free weekends until the end of the 'season' and are suddenly incredibly passionate about something called a 'B&M'. It all happened so quickly! Well my friend, I'm afraid to tell you that these are the classic side-effects of dating a coaster enthusiast! It's not an altogether terrible affliction, but just to help you with your self-diagnosis, let's take a closer look at some of the symptoms...

You have no free time
Where once your life was a sprawling calendar of free weekends and endless opportunities you now find yourself scrimping and scrambling for a free date, and relish the rarity that is a free weekend to curl up on the sofa and recover from the endless theme-parking. During the season pretty much every weekend is pre-allocated to at least some kind of theme park related activity.

Your non-theme park friends start taking the piss
Once your pre-relationship friends notice this new found hobby of yours, the jokes and piss-taking will start coming thick and fast. You'll be tagged in anything vaguely theme park related on social media and there'll probably be tongue in cheek comments hinting that they should probably stop inviting you to things altogether because you're always at a bloody park.

Top 10
When this ridiculousness started you insisted that you weren't really into it, and were just going along to be supportive. Time has passed, and you now find yourself with a proper allotted Top 10 coaster countdown that you've spent more hours than you care to admit tweaking and rearranging until it was just right. You know, to be supportive! It just makes having conversations with these coaster-types so much easier, right? Definitely not because you're genuinely starting to enjoy coasters or anything...

Random Knowledge
There'll come a moment where you're watching a humble quiz show with your family and there'll be a question about theme parks and you will reason that, somehow, despite all of your resistance, you know the answer. It's like all of this useless theme park trivia has seeped into your brain through osmosis purely acquired by spending so much time with nerds endlessly discussing parks. How did this even happen?!

You have a coaster count
This is like a step on from acquiring that Top 10 - a relationship milestone if you will. One evening you'll notice your partner squirelling away at their computer, and a few hours later they'll proudly present you with your very own coaster count! Hooray, aren't you lucky? Now you can join the cult and become as obsessed with riding kiddie creds and painful crap as they are. It's so nice to feel included.

You speak the language
As with any fandom, when you first started going out with these people, having a conversation with them about theme parks sometimes felt like speaking another language. But you've eased into it now and picked up on phrases and words here and there until finally you're fluent in coaster geek. You not only know what airtime is but can confidently explain the difference between ejector and floater airtime, as well as stating a preference (YOU MUST CHOOSE ONLY ONE!)

Essentially, what I'm saying is that coaster enthusiasm isn't just a hobby, it's a lifestyle. It's insidious in the way it creeps up on you, but let's face it if you really weren't that into it would you have continued to update the coaster-count? Of course not! Dating a coaster enthusiast is awesome (and being married to one is even better haha) - you've always got something going on and every week is a new adventure. It definitely beats sitting around at home watching Netflix all weekend, that's for sure!