Mending Marriages With TV Reruns
by Gil Hoy
I’d heard that talking about your marital problems with your spouse while watching TV reruns can be a good way to try to work things out and potentially save a marriage. I’d also heard this technique can sometimes work like magic. Sounds a little crazy, I know — maybe more than a little — but I was willing to try anything at that point because my wife, Judy, and I were constantly fighting. About anything and everything.
I’d also heard that you’re more likely to get a good result if you’re watching a TV rerun that you both really liked when you first saw it. That way, you’ll already be feeling good when you get to talking about the hard stuff that might get you or your spouse upset.
Most married couples want to make things work. I think it’s safe to say that no one who gets married is looking to get a divorce down the line. Personally, I consider divorce to be a failure. Right up there with losing your job and drinking too much. Couples need to be able to communicate effectively if they want to have a healthy relationship. I’m certain of that.
But it can be difficult, and often anger-producing and counterproductive, to do the hard work of trying to talk sensibly about the things that are bothering you in a focused, planned conversation. It’s perhaps better to approach your difficulties in a more indirect and less pressured way. With the TV on, you can talk if the timing feels right, particularly if the show is about a couple who regularly get along or have successfully mended a failing marriage, but you’re not required to do so.
And if the dialogue with your spouse gets too tense, you can always just stop talking without looking or acting upset, return to the show — you’ll know what’s going on, even if you’ve been talking for a while, because you’ve seen it all before — and start talking again later when the timing seems better.
And so I turned the TV on to something Judy and I had watched before and enjoyed. I was hoping for some magic, a conversation that might lead to positive change in the long run. I decided to wait for a while, looking for the best time to begin to talk. Judy was much more interested in the rerun than I was. She’d seen it quite a while ago and was particularly intrigued by certain parts of it. I liked it, too, but not as much as Judy.
Judy was eating celery and hummus. She was eating with such intensity and zeal that the crunching noise of the celery was often louder than the TV; celery was undoubtedly the noisiest vegetable in the house. And I could see everything that was going on in her mouth (too much information!) because Judy had horrible table manners. Her friends tell me she still does. She usually chewed with her mouth wide open when she ate. Which made her chewing even louder.
I waited a little longer before I started, gulping down the last half of my fourth beer. I was feeling rather relaxed. And so I started: “Judy, you know, there’s something that’s been bothering me for a while.”
Judy was crunching away on a piece of celery, smothered in hummus, with reckless abandon. “What did you say, baby?” she asked.
I continued: “There’s something that’s been bothering me for a while that I’d like to discuss with you, if I might.”
“Sure, honey,” Judy said, “but can I finish my celery first?”
“Sure,” I said, and politely waited. Judy continued to crunch away. Even louder than before. In fact, she was chewing so loudly that I could no longer hear the TV at all over her deafening, crunching sounds. So I turned the volume up. Might as well try to enjoy the rerun until Judy’s done, I thought.
The show seemed a little better because it distracted me from Judy’s crunching. Soon, she was crunching away on another piece of celery. And I could see the hummus, chewed up bits of celery and bubbly saliva in her mouth in the shape of a large, gooey ball. I was getting sick to my stomach.
And then, someone was getting shot on the TV rerun. For a moment, the gunshots were louder than Judy’s crunching. But, in a few seconds, the sound of the TV was drowned out again by Judy’s all too familiar crunching sounds. And it was really starting to piss me off.
Soon, I found myself not thinking about what was bothering me in the first place and thinking instead about Judy’s horrible manners. The crunching was so loud by then that I wanted to grab Judy’s face in my hands and hold her mouth closed to make the noise stop.
This went on for another twenty minutes or so. The rerun and Judy’s crunching sounds. And the TV commercials were particularly boring, which made the whole thing even worse. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I got up and went to the bathroom. When I returned, nothing had changed.
Finally, Judy was done. But by then, the rerun was over, and a new episode had begun. We hadn’t seen that one before. The sound of the TV was now very loud without Judy’s crunching. But she didn’t even notice because she was looking in the refrigerator for more food to eat. “What did you want to discuss?” Judy asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I was seething. “There’s no more celery in the house, is there?” I asked. Judy confirmed that she’d eaten the last of it. “Good. Thank God.” I said. “Let’s just watch the show.”
So much for so-called magical solutions to your marital problems. You can’t believe everything that you hear. Particularly from a boss who fired you without any explanation from a job you’d held and enjoyed for forty years. Maybe there’s just no magic in this world. And life can be so unfair.
Judy and I are divorced now, and I’m still looking for a new job. They replaced me with a younger employee. I won’t lie about it: I’m discouraged. And I’m drinking too much. The drinking got progressively worse during the course of the marriage.
Perhaps Judy and I should have just talked about and mutually agreed upon appropriate rules on when and how to have our discussion. For nothing could have been worse and more detrimental to a marriage than her hideous crunching sounds. Except, perhaps, trying to talk about serious things while watching an incommensurate, simple-minded TV show.
Copyright © 2022 by Gil Hoy
