Hello, Matthew--

Thank you for reading! For sure, it's healthy for people to have hobbies and interests. That's part of our personal identity, which isn't meant to disappear when we're in relationships. Glad you emphasized that point!

Here's a thought to add to that, again using women in the role of clingy person for ease of writing. Sometimes, when women are called 'clingy', an assumption is that they need to go develop their own hobbies and interests. But what if a woman does have her own hobbies and interests--yet is still perceived as clingy? That's where we start seeing that there's more to the story when we see a woman who does have hobbies but still wants more time with her guy than her guy is willing to give. Calling her 'clingy' is a superficial diagnosis, and telling her 'get a hobby' may be a superficial and ineffective treatment. it may be that's she has a legitimate need for quality time that isn't being met in the relationship. No number of hobbies and interests can make up for that when her honey isn't recognizing the other stuff that's going on, such as him not discussing the 'serious' stuff with her, or him using alone time as a means to prevent her from knowing him, or him making decisions during his alone time without her input.

I urge us all to look more closely at the 'diagnosis' of 'clingy' and search for some of the patterns described here to get a better feel of whether something else is going. For sure, we know there are situations where some people--men and women--are so dang 'needy' because they're revolving their whole lives around their relationship. Hopefully it's clear this article isn't about that but instead is about the cases where a woman being called clingy may actually not be clingy. So...maybe it would be good to say, 'pretend the woman being called clingy has plenty of hobbies and interests'. What, then, might explain this dis-connect between her being upset that he's not spending enough time with her, and him getting upset that she wants him to spend more time with him? That's the kind of scenario this article is meant to target.

Thank you for commenting, Matthew, so we could look at this a bit more deeply!

--Lee