The struggle with raiding vs. RL..

I have been struggling with this on and off for a little over a year now. I was in a raiding guild pre-BC, but we never really made it past Lucifron in MC. 40 raiders was a bit beyond our capacity at the time. We did a little AQ-20, and downed Hakkar, but that was about it. At the time I was crazy for the game, and I was so into the game my hubby finally started a character so that he could play with me, instead of waiting for me to get done with whatever I was doing in-game at the time.

Then BC came out, and a month or so afterwards I was removed from my raiding guild. Why? Because I wanted to take my time and experience the new content, not zoom through it as fast as I could go to 70 so I could start raiding again. I was extremely upset. My guild had become a big part of my life, I was very close friends with several people in it, and an officer besides. In the end I joined their alt guild, just to keep connected in some small way with the people I cared about.
When hubby and I finally got to 70, we eventually got to the point where we felt like we had run out of things to do. So, we applied and were accepted to my old raiding guild. I said to myself when I joined, that I would only raid one day a week, even though the raid schedule was 4 days. My work schedule was such that I would have to get up early, and I didn't want to exhaust myself staying up until 1AM every day.

I think that lasted a week. Maybe two. The guild was still running Kara and just starting on Gruul's, etc. so I didn't have a lot to do to catch up gear-wise to the rest of the raiding team. I started raiding more and more because I wanted to be there if my bow dropped, or whatever. There were a couple of days when I didn't go to the raid, and sure enough, the hunter that WAS there got the gun AND the bow from Kara, just because there was nobody else to take them. That only lent fuel to my fire. We started progressing through 25-mans, and Kara got moved to off-nights. Now I was raiding 5 nights a week because there were still a couple of things from Kara I wanted, plus I needed to start saving badges for the gear that was coming out.

It came to a head not too long ago when hubby started to get burned out. He had been promoted to Class Leader, and because we don't have a lot of warlocks, he felt that he needed to be there every night as well. It was a rough patch for us because I still wanted to play and raid, but it didn't seem right being the only one at the computer. We have since worked out a compromise, and have cut back on how much we're raiding. We've missed a couple of guild firsts, and probably some gear, but really, it's not like we're going to stop raiding tomorrow, and the gear will drop again. We take at least one night off a week to watch movies or just spend time together, and it has really helped.