It’s a weekday evening and I can hear my husband upstairs fighting for his life, trying to get the children to go to bed. The wine is ready and the snacks are lined up. I doom-scroll while I wait.
By the time he has come down the stairs, it is 9pm and I am doing sleep maths, wondering how many episodes we can binge before my mandatory bedtime of 11pm. In the end, I go to bed disappointed.
Our daughter kept coming downstairs, asking to be tucked in again, so we barely managed one episode.
Watching TV was starting to become an issue in our marriage. It used to be how we spent quality time together, but things had changed.
It wasn’t only children getting out of bed, but also the times one of us wasn’t feeling it or had work to do – whether cleaning the kitchen or our actual work. And then when we did manage it, we were barely present at all. I remember once looking over at my husband on the other side of the sofa, engrossed with his phone, and wondering what the point was.
My husband and I have a lot in common, but when it comes to TV viewing habits, he likes to take things slowly, and I like to binge. I have never understood his approach. Life gets in the way; children get out of bed. For an impatient person like me, it is no fun at all.
When my husband and I first got together, we would spend days in bed, watching trashy television and ordering takeaways. When our oldest was a newborn, we did the same thing. We would order Lebanese from a favourite restaurant and hold hands. Cut to 10 years and four children later, and we are on separate sides of the sofa staring at our phones.
The boiling point was when we tried to watch Yellowstone together. It was taking ages to get through, and I was getting frustrated. “Just watch it without me,” my husband ended up saying, annoyed at my impatience. So I did, and I don’t regret it.
Now we watch TV separately. There was no big conversation between my husband and me when it came to our TV divorce. We both realised that it wasn’t working, so now we have our own shows and we watch them in our own time, at our own pace.
It means we now spend our evenings together, talking to each other. We even go to bed earlier and cuddle into each other. I will tell him about a show I watched or a book I read. He will tell me about his day or about a podcast he is enjoying. Our relationship has become more analogue.
With a five-month-old baby in the mix, our schedule is out of whack anyway. And the truth is, watching television with your partner is not quality time. We were not connecting with each other, more just two people doing the same thing at the same time.
Our television divorce improved our marriage no end – I can’t recommend it enough.