I'm seventy-one years old, and in forty-two years of marriage I never once told my husband I can't stand car-restoration shows. My name is Carol, my husband is Walter, and we live in Dayton, Ohio, in the same house on Grafton Avenue we've had since I can remember. It wasn't until this year, because of a cheap little TV we bought for our son's old bedroom, that I found out I'd spent twenty years making myself a martyr nobody had asked me to be.
I'll start with dinner. In our house it's always six thirty, because Walter has diabetes and needs to eat on schedule. After that he washes the dishes, I wipe the counter, I toss the scraps out for the neighbor's cat, who shows up under our kitchen window almost every evening. Then we sit down on the couch. For years that moment always looked the same: he grabs the remote, I say "put on whatever you want," and we watch what he likes. Cable news panels, Bengals games, war movies, and those awful shows about rebuilding old Camaros that I still don't understand to this day. Sometimes I'd murmur something so it looked like I was paying attention, when really I was knitting or scrolling on my phone.
I never thought of myself as a pushover wife. On other things I always had my own opinion — where we went on vacation, which couch we bought, which pediatrician our granddaughter saw. But something in me just switched off in front of the television. I'd say "I don't care, whatever's fine" and leave it at that.
It all started coming apart over a show. My neighbor down the hall, Diane, recommended some Scandinavian crime series. I put on the first episode one Tuesday while Walter had driven out to pick up the grandkids from soccer practice. I got so wrapped up in it I didn't even notice him come home. There were maybe fifteen, eighteen minutes left in the episode. He sat down next to me, watched for about five minutes, then asked if we could switch to the news. I turned it off without a word.
That stung. But what hurt more was something I realized later, lying in bed: he hadn't even noticed I was watching something. To him, the TV playing next to me was just background noise, the same as the radio in the kitchen. It never occurred to him that I might have my own show, because for twenty years I hadn't had one.
A month later our son-in-law, an electrician by trade, hung an old hand-me-down TV in our son's former bedroom — we'd had it boxed up in the closet for three years. The idea was for Walter to watch games in there when I had my friends over for coffee in the living room. But one evening I made myself a cup of chamomile tea, walked into that room, pulled the door mostly shut so I couldn't hear the noise from the living room, and sat down in our son's old recliner, the one with the torn upholstery on the armrest. I stayed almost two hours.
I did it again the next night. And the night after that. At first it was wonderful. I watched movies, game shows, a travel program about Portugal, none of it interrupted by comments like "that engine's junk." But after a few weeks I noticed something that unsettled me: we'd basically stopped spending evenings together. Dinner, dishes, and then each of us to our own screen.
One day Walter asked me straight out if I was mad at him. I said no.
"Because you don't sit with me anymore."
I reminded him that for years I'd sat right next to him watching things that didn't interest me in the slightest. He was genuinely surprised. He'd been convinced I actually liked his shows.
"You never said you didn't want to," he said.
And he was right. That's what bothered me most. For years I'd been storing up this small resentment I never spoke out loud. I'd expected him to just figure out I was bored, while I kept telling him it didn't matter to me either way.
We argued that night, though not with raised voices — we never raise our voices in this house, the walls are too thin, the rooms too small. I brought up that he'd never asked. He brought up that I'd been pretending. Neither of us was entirely right.
The next day we sat down at the kitchen table, me with tea, him with black coffee — the doctor had recently told him to cut back on sugar — and worked out something that twenty years earlier would have been ridiculously simple to figure out. Two nights a week I pick, two nights he picks, and if one of us isn't into the other's choice, we can just go into the other room without making a whole production of it. On Fridays we try to find something we both like.
The first night that was mine, I put on that same Scandinavian crime show from the beginning. Walter swore he'd be bored out of his mind. Half an hour in, he was the one asking me to rewind because he'd missed a line of dialogue. A week later I watched a documentary with him about the history of the Bengals — back when they made the playoffs regularly — and, to my surprise, I got more into it than I expected.
It's not that we suddenly like exactly the same things now. It's that for the first time, we both actually know what the other one likes.
But that's not the whole story. Because once we'd set up that schedule, I remembered something I'd been putting off for years — a senior gym membership at the community center on Wayne Avenue that I'd been paying for every month, thirty-five dollars, and never once used, because every evening I "had to" sit with Walter in front of the TV. I called and canceled it, and I put that money toward a watercolor class at the arts center downtown, held on Tuesdays, which happens to be one of Walter's TV nights. Nobody had ever stopped me from doing that. I'd simply never let myself do it for twenty years.
When Walter found out I'd canceled the gym membership, he just shrugged and said that in that case, on Tuesdays he'd invite his buddy from down the street, the one obsessed with muscle cars, and they'd watch their engine shows together, out loud, with no apologies to anyone.
We laughed about that for a long time. And I think for the first time in ages, we both knew exactly why we were laughing.
