Fighting Over What To Watch On TV? You're Not Alone
Don't let the TV remote (or your streaming service!) tear you apart.
angga aditya on Unsplash I was up half the night again, and it's all my husband’s fault. His invitation sounded so innocent at first. "Will you watch Nip/Tuck with me?" he asked disingenuously, cueing up the show for a nostalgic binge-watch.
Brandishing the remote control, he might as well have been the devil, beckoning me with a seductive flick of his pitchfork. This time, however, I knew enough to resist his blandishments.
Having caught a glimpse of the previous episode, in which a hack plastic surgeon and his evil assistant plan to kill off their handsome rival, Christian, I said firmly, "No way."
Even without murder plots, I find Nip/Tuck — an excruciatingly graphic Ryan Murphy drama from 2003 that features weekly scenes of people's faces being sliced up — awfully hard to take.
I've always heard that couples fight most about money and sex. Not us. We fight about television, and the opportunities are endless.
When my husband persuades me to watch scary or gory shows with him, I spend a significant portion of the hour with my hands clapped over my eyes, listening to the ominously percussive music that accompany the revolting surgery scenes or murderous stalking sequences, while waiting for him to tell me it's safe to look at the screen again.
Okay, so I'm a wuss; this much has never been in dispute.
But even after I walked away from his Nip/Tuck binge, I kept wondering what happened to Christian, and by the time my husband came to bed I couldn't resist asking. Biiiiig mistake.
"The bad guy thinks the reason he's not successful is that he's not good-looking, so he's got Christian strapped down on the operating table, and he's going to cut off his face and perform a face transplant," my husband said calmly. Then he turned out the light and went to sleep.
Cut off his face and perform a what? I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my head teeming with horrible images. Finally I drifted off to sleep, but at two a.m. I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding from a nightmare about Hannibal Lechter wearing the prison guard's face while leering hideously at the ambulance driver he was about to butcher.
As the minutes ticked by, I obsessed on the logistics of hacking off someone's face and applying it to your own. By 4:30 I was ready to kill my beloved, who had been snoring peacefully for hours. Why was I always taking TV plotlines so personally? I guess it's just who I am.
When it comes to arguing, the main point of conflict for every couple is different.
In my marriage, we fight about the fact that I don't like watching TV with my husband, an activity he sees as sociable and I find emotionally alienating.
We fight about the value of TV, which he regards as a vehicle for worthy cultural offerings and I view as a waste of time.
When I do succumb, we fight about the fact that I invariably regret it; even when kids aren't dying on hospital shows or molls aren't getting whacked on gangster shows, the tamest of story lines can get me so riled up I don't sleep for hours.
Then guess who feels guilty and gets mad at me?
And of course, being as we are in a committed relationship, we argue over who has control of the remote.
My husband hates the fact that he has to watch TV in the living room instead of lying in bed channel surfing or streaming for hours, which he feels is any man's God-given prerogative. But every time he flicks from one show to the next, I get absorbed in what's going on and then he blithely hops to something else. Storius interruptus makes me miserable.
"You don't even let me skip the commercials!" my husband says accusingly every time we watch something on the DVR. "How can you get emotionally involved in commercials?" Having lived for for multiple decades with a woman who is famous for weeping over telecommunications ads, he should know what a dumb question this is.
As for me, I simply don't understand how men can be so disengaged that they don't care whether the jumper jumped, or the child escaped from the kidnappers, or the detective apprehended the serial killer before he managed to murder her.
Such conflicts are virtually ubiquitous, it seems. Since more than 95-percent of American homes have televisions and 74% of homes have at least one streaming service like Netflix or Hulu, negotiating its use is a nearly universal challenge in this country.
Back in the dark ages when a household was lucky to have one television set, families used to argue about what to watch. Now that people have multiple TVs as well as DVRs, OnDemand and streaming services, couples don't need to make either/or choices. But they still have to work out who gets to watch what and how, and where.
Clearly I'm not the only wife who doesn't want to experience certain kinds of programming.
"Living in an entirely male household, I've come to the conclusion that men will watch any sport that involves muscle and sweat and blood," observes my friend Judy, a writer who lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two teenaged sons.
"Their favorite is blood; they like unlimited blood. I think programs should be rated according to the amount of blood spilled. They could rate them by buckets."
Judy likes cooking shows, but she can't seem to get her family to watch with her.
"The guys in my family seem to have a 'chick' sensor, and they won't go near those shows," she says sadly.
Judy and I aren't the only women who find themselves at odds with the men in their lives over who controls the remote or who creates that Netflix queue.
Ask any couple about their television-watching habits, and chances are you'll hear about the gender wars. "My husband likes these stupid shoot-em-ups, and I won't let him watch them in my presence," says Ann Abram, a psychoanalyst who lives in Westport, Conn. "I hate the noise and the violence; I don't want to be subjected to it."
In her case, technology provided an easy solution. "I insisted he use headphones," she says.
Another man, Michael Mulheren, admits that he not only gravitates toward war movies, he also likes to watch more than one at a time.
"If you have two war movies on at the same time, you never have to miss a battle scene," explains Michael, an actor on Broadway in La Cage aux Folles and on television in Rescue Me.
"When they stop fighting, he changes the channel," his wife reports with a sigh.
Gender-based stereotypes are odious, of course, but come on, you can't tell me there are a lot of women out there watching two war movies simultaneously so they can switch back and forth for maximum carnage.
Which brings us back to the biggest problem of all. Even when Mulheren is watching Animal Planet, his wife can't stand doing it with him.
"He controls the remote, and he likes to flip around," says Butterbaugh, an actress. "He can watch four or five things at once, and it doesn't seem to bother him when he misses something, but it really bugs me. So if I want to watch something uninterrupted, I watch alone."
Mulheren's explanation is simple. "Men get bored," he says.
"Women want to know what's on television. Men want to know what else is on television."
So what is it with men and the remote? Are these control issues? Are they masculine gendered behaviors, or something innate? And what happens in queer or non-binary relatioonships?
It may be a stereotype, and perhaps it's not quite as binary as this gendered assumption may make it, but it does seem as though there are two different types of viewers.
The sociological literature is full of academic treatises on the subject (my favorite being the one that traced men's insistence on controlling the remote back to their ancestors wielding maces in the Middle Ages).
References to phallic symbols, men's social anxiety, and the male need to dominate abound, as do quasi-Darwinian speculations about men's reluctance to commit, whether to a program or a woman, a line of thought that would sound all too familiar to Carrie Bradshaw.
"Television is a medium of instant gratification," my husband explains. "If you go back to the classic paradigm of the male as hunter, a man with the remote is hunting for thrills, and there is no reason to stay with anything that's not thrilling you."
He flashes me a wicked grin. "Just as there's no reason to stay with a woman who's not thrilling you."
Women find their own ways of fighting back, of course.
"I've been known to hide the remote," admits Jill Robertson, a communications manager who lives in San Francisco with her husband, Jason Schulte, an art director. "I'll put it under a couch cushion."
While it's tempting to view such chronic skirmishes as part of the eternal battle between the sexes, they can transcend gender, as evidenced by the TV conflict occurring same-sex and non-binary relationships, too.
"There's never a season when the television is not on in our house," says Carolyn Montgomery, a cabaret singer who lives in New York City with her partner, Lea Forlani, a chef, and their son.
"Lea watches hockey, football, baseball, basketball, and tennis; she's such a sports fan she can recite statistics back to the 1970s. This is her way of decompressing, and she enjoys it."
Montgomery suspects that for Lea, as for many modern workaholics, TV serves the same purpose a couple of martinis might have in the 1950s.
"I'm thrilled she's not sitting there with a cocktail, but when I think the TV is on too much I'll actually evaluate her day and her week," Montgomery confesses. "If she's had a really tough day, I totally see decompressing in front of the TV, but if it's the third game on the third night, I'll say, "Is it really important that you see this game?"
Even my own husband admits that otherwise smart, intellectually engaged people can overdo it.
"The worst aspect of TV is as a narcotic for people who just watch indiscriminately to avoid communicating and avoid thinking about things," he acknowledges.
Most couples who have been together for any length of time work out ways to negotiate such issues in a civilized fashion.
"My husband and I kind of feel eachother out: How important is it to the other person to watch a certain show?" says Anne Bauer, a psychiatrist who lives in Greenfield, Mass. "We tend to get involved in the same shows. But when marital tensions are percolating, television can also become a weapon, and an effective one, at that."
"My husband DVRs a lot of golf," says Jill Robertson. "One time we got in a big fight, and I was so frustrated I deleted every program. I deleted all his settings and all his shows. He lost a lot of golf, and it was right in the middle of a big golf tournament. I didn't say anything about it, and neither did he, but it was a whole new way to get back at him."
For other couples, television can actually provide a way to bond. Especially if they can binge-watch a series together.
"I'm a TV junkie," confesses Meredith Beebe, a stay-at-home mother of two small children in Raleigh, N.C.
"I really enjoy any kind of television. My husband is not as into sitcoms and reality shows as I am, but we both enjoy watching fun reruns like Scrubs and football as well as HBO dramas like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones and Six Feet Under.
"I think laughing together is a really fun thing to do, and relating together on some level feels good, so I really look forward to that time when we're watching something together." Beebe, whose mother was a Ph.D. and an opera fan who also loved to watch soap operas, has little patience with those cultural elitists who turn up their noses at television.
"I embrace TV," she says. "It's a part of our culture that's fun, and if you know how to have balance in your life, it's fine. You don't have to be a snob about it."
Oops, I guess I'm caught in the act.
But even I have a guilty secret. I have never admitted this to my husband, but when I'm out of town on a business trip, staying alone in a hotel, I turn on the television for company.
Although I'm often in a country where I don't speak the language, I nevertheless find myself channel-surfing through programs as people shout at each other in Arabic or wail in Urdu or declare their love in Swahili.
My utter lack of comprehension means I don't get emotionally involved in any of them; I can watch with curiosity and complete dispassion, like an anthropologist studying exotic tribes. But if someone picks up a scalpel, I'm outta there.
Leslie Bennetts is a writer who lives in New York with her husband, two children, one dog, two fish, and three televisions. She is the author of the book, The Feminine Mistake, published by Harper Collins.