Marriage and Football

I was walking with a few of my fellow qualifying exam sufferers the other day when the subject of weekend football watching came up. My classmate was complaining that his girlfriend complained when he tried to watch football on the weekends, and I commented that I just ceded the television during football season. He joked that my husband had trained me well, and I rebutted that weekends = football was one of the first things I learned about my then-boyfriend, now husband. I was told he was lucky.

I have heard all the variations on this. The guys who complain that their wives never let them watch football and force them to watch HGTV. The women who call themselves 'football widows' and complain they never see their husbands during football season. There are of course the couples who are both passionate about football, but I have met one such couple in my entire life, so I can't say if that's really any less stressful.

I am not a football fan. I was never interested in sports growing up. Professional sports seemed pointless, and football particularly stupid, just a bunch of large men imitating rams and slamming their head together to get a non-ball shaped ball from one end to the other. Dear Husband on the other hand has been a football fan as long as he can remember. "Go Eagles" may or may not have been his first words. When football isn't in season, he pines for it. When it is on, he watches as many games as he humanly can, and reads about the rest. Given this dynamic, why am I not complaining every weekend from August to January?

Part of it is,  I knew what I was getting into from the get-go. I knew he was a die-hard football fan, and that football trumped everything else viewing wise. It took me a little while to accept it, and it sometimes irks me, but I can accept this as part of who my husband is. He'll still talk to me, help with things on commercials, pay attention to me and if a game is just terrible he'll sometimes watch something else with me. I never feel abandoned, or second place to football. I've known guys who treat football with religious reverence. Talking to them while the game is in play is sacrilege on the scale of gossiping loudly during the Lord's Prayer. I may lose the ability to watch my shows on the big screen during football season, but I've never lost my place to it.

So I'll sit with my husband, and watch football with him. Then I might go do my own thing, or sit with him and read while he watches. And so our house is at peace, even during football season.