Playing with my husband made our marriage stronger

WHEN IT COMES to video games and weddings, it’s usually not good news. Pop culture, books and movies are full of anecdotes or comedy sketches about a despised and frustrated wife who has been abandoned by her husband for the latest video game.

I can picture it now: Usually the wife enters her husband’s dark, damp lair in some wildly uncomfortable underwear in an effort to seduce the caffeine-laden husband from one game or another. He ends up screaming and furious, but not in good spirits.

Not in my case, though. Just playing video games with my two-year-old husband, Jethro, now 27, has made our marriage stronger – and now I feel closer to him than ever.

When the coronavirus pandemic closed the world as we knew it in March 2020, Jethro and I hadn’t even been married in a year. We spent our first wedding anniversary that summer locked in our small two-bed apartment in London, lamenting what it might have been like. We finished everything: running, cookbooks, redecoration, our record collection, and coffee. Sometimes it was tense – it wasn’t a life for a married couple, was it?

In fact, we had never really played together before. Jethro likes difficult adventure games with impossible puzzles, logic, fighting and big ass weapons. I do not have. I like games with bright colors, friendships, and “doing good”. The closest thing to the fight was the big ass arms were in Fallout 3, and even then I ran away from the angry dogs.

We like different things and we have different personalities, so playing together has never been considered. Jethro is a number man; it’s cool, collected, and incredibly logical. I am a creative, a writer, an overly sensitive Pisces with a terrible memory and zero logic. We are polar opposites when it comes to life and play. So our game life was very separate, very personal for us individually, and we had never had the opportunity to bond, or work together as a couple, when it came to our screen time.

It turns out that we are not alone. There have been a handful of studies over the years that have revealed the negative impact the game can have on marriages. Amazing, in 2018, the website Online divorce suggested which has seen a marked increase in Fortnite be cited as grounds for divorce among its users. About 5 percent of all divorce papers she received that year said the game had a role in breaking up their marriage.

In a previous study, published in 2012 yes u Leisure Research Journal, Researchers have found that 75 percent of gamers ’(often male) spouses want the gamer in their relationship to put more effort into their marriage. They said it led to dissatisfaction in their relationship and arguments, as it messed up family time and intimacy.

However, the same study revealed that among couples who shared game time and played together, 76 percent thought the game was good for their marriage. They were more satisfied in their relationship than they were in the same team. He revealed that working together works wonders.

So when it came to joining orders and buying a Nintendo Switch during the lockdown last year, I was nervous. Skeptical, too. I imagined playing Crossbreeding Animals until 4 o’clock in the morning, picking peaches and bathing for clams while my husband slept alone in our bed, and vice versa. I was worried we would fight for the console, and I would end up eating alone while my husband swore and sweated to fight Dynamax Pokémon in Shield Pokémon.

I ended up watching it for hours trying to catch 150 Digletts on the game Armor Island expansion, and I feel angry – losing my patience for something that was meant to be enjoyable. I was quick, I had nothing but negative comments to offer about his style of play and his technique, simply because I couldn’t engage him. At times, I ended up staying further and further away from him on the couch, feeling the console that it should be. ours. It’s until we get 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Lament of the Wild.