If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (7 page)

Since we had only four channels—the three networks plus a mostly fuzzy version of Fox you might be able to pick up if there was just the right amount of tinfoil wrapped around the rabbit ears—this wasn’t an overwhelming task. I’d twist the dial six or seven times until he made his decision (“Is that your final answer, Dad?”), adjust the antenna to the sweet spot of maximum clarity, and be on my way.

What a difference a few decades makes. Now we’ve got
nine hundred channels
to choose from, and if we are so inclined we never have to watch another commercial as long as we live. No longer do we have to wait in eager anticipation for the occasional instant replay; we can watch any scene we’d like, frame by gloriously detailed frame, any old time we please. (If you haven’t done this while watching
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, you are absolutely missing out.) This combination of bottomless options and selective viewing has turned what was once an opportunity to relax or even cuddle on the couch into a highly charged competitive sport.

The key to winning the modern-day television Olympics, of course, is to acquire possession of the remote control and to retain it for the duration of the match. (And although the definition of a “match” is subjective, generally you’re talking about any time period between a thirty-second commercial and a rainy four-day holiday weekend.) If your opponent manages to wrestle the remote away from you—through either bribery, physical threats, manipulation, the promise of sexual favors, or the withholding thereof—the odds of getting it back are infinitesimal. Once you no longer stand any chance of reclaiming the coveted clicker, you might as well go fix yourself a nice sandwich or give the dog a bath, because you lose. Game over.

I lose a lot, mostly because I don’t care all that much. If I were single and childless, I would cheerfully count myself among the less than 0.01 percent of lucky Americans who do not own a TV. But because I am neither of those things, I have grudgingly joined the mind-boggling 99.9 percent of the people in this country who are the proud owners of nearly three sets each—machines we collectively watch with appalling frequency. According to the A. C. Nielsen Company, the most esteemed media research group in the world, the typical American logs more than five hours in front of the TV every single day. In case you’re not a fan of math, I’ll do the calculating for you: That’s thirty-five hours a week, or seventy-seven days a year of uninterrupted idiot box watching. If Average Andy manages to keep up that prolific couch potato pace until he is eighty, he will have spent more than
thirteen years of his life
glued to the tube. Where, I ask you, is Michael Moore’s blistering documentary about what
that’s
doing to our society?

Call me a big, fat hypocrite, but I’m married and I’m a mom. So in addition to the SUV, the black lab, and the white picket fence, I own precisely the number of TVs I am supposed to own, even though I rarely watch any of them. I might be inclined to tune in more if I knew how to work the remote, or if there weren’t such a disconcertingly large number of options to choose from, or if my husband didn’t care if I also did something else—like balance my checkbook or write thankyou notes or check Twitter from my iPhone—while I was watching. But for some inexplicable reason, Joe not only is desperate for me to be his cable companion, but wants a full 100 percent of my uninterrupted focus to be on the television for the duration of the programming.

I do not understand this need at all. I mean, I get the bit about his wanting my company. You know, because we’re married and we love to spend time together and if I’m watching the same show he is, ostensibly I’m not interrupting him every four minutes to ask him to do something around the house. It’s the part where he minds when I multitask that confuses me.

“Want me to rewind that?” he’ll ask.

“No, why?” I’ll respond, intently focused on the laundry pile in front of me.

“Because you were the one who picked this movie and that part was really funny and you were folding that towel so I thought maybe you missed it,” he says.

“It’s okay,” I insist. “I heard it. It
was
funny!” I say the last part out of courtesy and refrain from adding
I wanted to read, but you begged me to watch a movie so quit bitching about the movie I picked or what I’m doing while I’m watching it
.

“You didn’t laugh,” he pouts.

“I laughed on the
inside
, dear,” I reply. “I’ll try to be more vocal with my displays of hilarity from now on.”

“Well, I have to rewind it now anyway, so I’ll just go back to that part,” he says.

“You ready?” he asks, when the sidesplitting moment in question is all cued up.

“Yup!” I tell him, continuing with the folding. Three or four minutes later I realize he hasn’t hit the play button yet. If he is waiting for me to gaze meaningfully into the television set’s lifeless electronic eyes, he’s going to be there an awfully long time.

“You know what? I think I’m just going to go read,” I say, because obviously boob-tubing is not something we were built to do as a team. He’s got the TV tuned to
SportsCenter
before I am even on my feet. Joe knows I can’t stand the sound of televised sports, so he courteously dons the headphones he gave me for Christmas one year (they were a mock gift because we both knew he’d be the one wearing them, and because he actually
does
wear them with loving regularity, they were the best gift he’s ever given me). From this point forward, any attempts to communicate with him are strictly prohibited. It’s hard enough for him to tear his attention away from the screen when he’s
not
wearing sound-canceling headgear. Should I dare to require his input or consideration then, there’s usually a great show of locating the remote and finding and pressing the pause button before he’ll look at me with a dramatic sigh, because clearly I should know that a man cannot watch, listen, and talk at the same time. When the headphones are in place, I could run through the room naked with my hair on fire and unless I stopped to smolder directly in front of the screen, my bare-assed pyrotechnic show would go entirely unnoticed.

He can’t sleep without the television blaring, or more accurately he takes the
position
that he can’t sleep without the television blaring. Which is complete and utter bullshit because what is the first thing he does upon boarding a plane, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, watching a movie in the theater, or reading a book to his kids? You guessed it: fall asleep. Seriously, he is a strong sleeper. He sleeps deep and long but insists that the white noise and white light of the television remain on until he is into a solid REM cycle. So in order to keep the peace I do one of two things: One, attack him when I get into bed and insist he turn off the TV; or two, wait until he’s asleep and then turn the damn thing off myself.

VICKY

 

 

As frustrating as it may be to try to watch TV with my husband, it’s picnicking in Versailles compared to trying to watch it solo. I’m not saying that Joe is smarter than I am, or that he orchestrated this intentionally just so that I would never,
ever
watch TV of my own accord, but you need an advanced engineering degree to watch a simple sitcom in my house. I discovered this the hard way the first time Joe went out of town after having set up our high-tech new “home theater system.” (The one I still argue should have come with a popcorn maker or
something
useful and deserving of the name.) He made me diagrams and cheat sheets, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of them. It wouldn’t matter, he assured me, because if I got stuck, all I had to do was press the handy “help” button on the $400 universal remote and it would walk me right through any possible scenario. Turns out the professed “help” button isn’t so helpful if you’re the sort who gets lost trying to find the bathroom in Best Buy and you wouldn’t know a coaxial cable from a crossover conduit if your very life was riding on the correct answer.

“Is the TV on?” the remote asks right off the bat. Already I am stumped. I study the TV. The screen is black but there’s a little light in the corner. Since “I’m not sure but I think so” isn’t an option, I hit YES.

“Is the PVR on?” it wants to know.

I’m sure it would help if I knew what a PVR was, but I don’t. I look around the media cabinet for something that says PVR on it, but I can’t find anything so I randomly select NO.

“Is the AV receiver on? Is the video monitor set to output 6? Is the DVD/VCR set to input mode? Is the remote sensor window blocked? Do you want to restore factory settings? What’s the square root of 4,309,782, who was the eleventh president of the United States, and if I offered you a million dollars, could you define the word
the
?”

Go Zen, I tell myself as I randomly answer YES and NO to thousands of bewildering questions. “
Now
is the PVR on?” it asks at one point, and I think I hear it sigh. I start to feel the way I always do at the optometrist when he asks me to cover one eye and tell him whether A or B looks sharper, clearer, better. My personal theory is that since
they look exactly the same
it is unmistakably a trick question, a way of seeing if you’re paying attention. “Yes,” I tell the remote control this time. “Now the PVR
is
on!”

Suddenly—and I am not just saying that for dramatic emphasis, believe me; it really does happen out of nowhere—the impossible happens: The television set turns itself on. Surely this is merely a miraculous coincidence and not the result of something I’ve done. If it’s the latter, I’m actually bummed—because it’s not like I could reproduce the winning sequence if you held a gun to my head.

Slightly shaken by this unexpected turn of events, I begin scrolling through the online TV guide, which features incomprehensible portions of the titles of the roughly one thousand shows I have the luxury of choosing from. I’ve made it to 277 when the phone rings.

“You’re still awake?” Joe asks. I look at the clock and it’s more than an hour past the time I normally turn in.

“Oh, yeah, I was just reading,” I lie. I refuse to admit how I spent the last several hours.

“I was just going to leave you a message asking you to record something for me while I’m gone,” he says. “It’s super easy. Want me to walk you through it?”

“Can we do it tomorrow?” I ask. “I’m exhausted.” And if I have to look at that godforsaken remote again tonight, something is going to get broken.

My husband has this awful habit of pulling out back hairs with his fingers while we’re watching TV. He just reaches behind his neck to his back and yanks them out one by one. We’ll be sitting there watching
True Blood
when all of a sudden the couch jerks with this crazy force of him pulling his back hairs out! He doesn’t have a hairy back, just a few stray hairs, which he only feels the urge to remove when we’re watching TV together. It is beyond gross.

DEILIA

 

 

This may come as a shock to you, but it is universally accepted (by most people with penises at least), so you might as well get used to it: Once a man has pressed the power button on the TV, he is officially “watching it,” for all of eternity or until he manually turns it off himself, whichever comes last. (Power outages don’t “count” as an active act of disengagement, either. Just so you know.) You might think because he is fast asleep, has gotten into the shower, or just boarded a plane for a twoweek business trip on another continent that you might then be free to change the channel or—if you’re feeling
really
ballsy—turn the thing off entirely, but you’d be wrong.

“Did you turn off the TV?” he’ll ask in a terrifying Hannibal Lecter voice.

“Well, um, yeah, I did—” you’ll stammer, confused.

“I was watching that!”
he’ll roar from the puddle of drool/ steamy bathroom/faraway tarmac, frightening the bejesus out of you because you’d have bet your last dollar that you were well within your legal/marital television operating rights when you assumed control. Do not even try to rationalize with him by pointing out that he was unconscious or in a different time zone, because the conversation will turn preschool on your ass before you can say Hanna-Barbera.

“Honey, you were not watching that,” you’ll say with a small chuckle, as if you are both mature adults who can laugh and admit when they are being patently ridiculous.

“Was too!” he’ll bellow, huffing and planting his hands on his hips dramatically. (You won’t be able to see this over the phone, but trust me—he’s doing it.)

“Were not,” you’ll say incredulously. Well, he wasn’t!

“Was to-oooooo!” he’ll shout, eyes closed and index fingers stuck in his ears. To answer your unspoken questions: Yes, you married him, and no, it’s not worth divorcing him over unless you want to stay single and celibate forever, because eventually you would have this exact conversation with every other man on the planet.

When I’m in bed watching TV, he’ll come in and try to persuade me to change the channel to something we “both” like. I’m not stupid. What he means is that he wants to change it to something
he
likes.

MIKEY

 

 

Now, I know lots of people—some of them even women—who like to watch TV in bed. As you could probably surmise, I am not one of them. I like to go to bed early and get up early, and I can’t sleep unless I’m in silent pitch-blackness, so it just wouldn’t work. Joe has begged many, many times over the years to get me to
just try it
, but I always stand firm on this one. He even attempted to woo me with the compelling argument that it would be “really fun for the girls to climb in here on Saturday mornings and watch cartoons.” It’s hard not to hate a man who can easily sleep through the SpongeBob theme song, but my husband really does have many redeeming qualities, so I try to fixate mostly on those. No matter what Joe’s argument is, I know I will win as soon as I whip out the sex card, the one that conveniently details the scores of studies that have found that couples who have TVs in their bedrooms have less sex than couples who don’t.