I think based on personal observation that this is overblown. For one thing, wives tend to like to have things to roll their eyes at when it comes to spouses, you know, like leaving the toilet seat up, or rolling their eyes at obsession with sports teams, etc, they never really outgrow I think when as young girls and they get irritated at boys for doing something and say "Boys!" *lol*. They need things to complain about when talking to friends
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My wife encourages me, I am the reluctant one, I have a hard time spending money on myself while having no problem spending on others (the money I spent on my son's music education would have allowed me to buy a nice house built around a layout, and told Mike Regan and TRWX to build one heck of a layout and still have money to burn) and I am the same way with my wife (okay, at York I told people my wife encouraged me to go and find stuff I liked, but then she didn't go knowing I hate spending money on myself.....*lol*..hey, husbands play the game, too). She thinks it is great I love trains and she does like watching them.
I think given the cost of this stuff that in some cases they might resent it if money is spent on the trains and there are other things they feel need to be done, that boils down to communication and negotiation, but that is true of anything, had a guy I worked with back in the 90's lay down 40k in cash to buy a Corvette, when they had kids about ready to enter college and other things, wondered why the wife was angry at him....some, too, if they are as obsessive as some of the people I have seen at train shows, at York and on forums, might be resentful that they are spending too much time on trains, it is a hobby after all , a diversion (on the other hand, could be the person spends all their time on the trains to get away....).
Where I have seen it generally is where the spouse looks at it as a grown person 'playing with trains', that it is a waste of time and money, and more importantly, in their mind, 'what will other people think' kind of thing. The same spouse that would resent a husband 'playing with trains' wouldn't bat an eye if he belonged to a country club and played golf all the time (one thing my wife and I see eye to eye on, neither one of us understands golf or country clubs, but that is just us), they wouldn't object is hubby had season tickets to the local football team or went hunting or fishing with buds or played poker, because those are 'socially acceptable' for men to do, there is still a lot of those kind of attitudes out there, it isn't just women who get bound in stereotypes.
They are afraid of the hubby being seen as odd, or as being anti social (ok, that stereotype does have grains of truth to it, some of the people I see at train shows , well.....on the other hand, if they met Gun Runner John as I was lucky to at First Frost, blow the stereotype right out the water! *lol*) or are 'being childish'. Some may have grown up around a culture, religious or otherwise, that frowned on that kind of 'frivolous recreation', that once you 'grew up', that was that for fun and games.
IME most wives are okay or supportive of the hobby, maybe even into it themselves, as long as it is in balance with budget and with living a balanced life, met very few who were negative. I suspect that attitude was more common a long time ago, when my mom and dad were first married (1952), that first Christmas after finding out my dad never had trains as a kid she got her brother , who was buying trains for my cousin at the time (who was like 8 months old that Christmas!), to duplicate the order for my dad. He worked at Bell Labs in NYC at the time, and the other people he worked with not only thought that was a brilliant gift they were jealous bc it would cause them problems.
