Recently, we canceled cable and purchased a fancy new smart TV. It felt so good to be rid of that giant monthly bill, and now my kid can watch Daniel Tiger on the “big screen” instead of being relegated to watching on my laptop. But even better for my husband and me—we are now actually watching TV together.
Once upon a time, hubby and I watched cooking shows, and I fell asleep on him while he caught late-night European soccer games. But that was before marriage. Definitely before kids. That was back when time stretched ahead of us and we were more interested in being together than worrying about what we were actually doing.
Fast forward a few years and we pretty much never watched TV together. First problem: I don’t watch TV. I didn’t even own a TV before we married, and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Next, hubby prefers Italian shows while I prefer to watch in English. And when our brains are fried, dealing with the other’s home language is just that much harder.
But wait, there’s more. My husband is a channel surfer. I don’t mind watching something that isn’t my favorite, but I can’t stand it when he grabs the remote and changes it. It always seems to happen right when I’m committed.
Lastly, my husband likes to discuss what’s happening. That would be fine, except I can’t hear the show and then I don’t know at all what’s happening.
Quitting cable and sticking with Netflix has turned pretty much all of that around. First, it’s just so easy to choose what to watch. Everything is laid out and related shows that we may be interested in (and we usually are) pop right up.
Netflix doesn’t lend itself to channel surfing. We always finish what we start, and I love it.
We watch with the subtitles on. I mentioned that we have a language gap, but we don’t use subtitles to translate. We keep the subtitles on in the same language as the audio. That helps us fully understand what we are watching, even when it is not in our preferred language.
The subtitles have also made it possible for me to stop nagging my husband about talking over the audio. If his voice covers the actors’, I can still read the dialog on the screen. Problem solved.
I knew quitting cable would help our pocketbook, but I never thought it would also help our marriage! We are currently watching The Roman Empire, and that, plus dinner, makes for an easy and fun date night in. At this point, nothing could be better!
