My hunch is that many of you were not able to keep calm for Sunday football. Why? You were fighting with your spouse about everything that needs to be done instead of sitting in front of a television. You were unable to keep calm due to the enormous amount of guilt you feel for relaxing instead of working. You were so angry at your spouse for sitting in front of the TV while you feel stuck having to take care of the kids, the house, and your nagging mother who calls every five minutes. If this sounds like your typical Sunday experience, I can tell you right now that you are wrong. Doesn’t matter if you are the one watching the football in this scenario or the one that is unhappy that their spouse is watching football – you are wrong. Your perception of why this is happening Sunday after Sunday is most likely inaccurate. For the purpose of this article, I will use the typical gender roles that fit into this situation as the husband doing the watching and the wife doing the nagging. Ladies, let me first remind you that we have our own method of escaping reality. We like to watch movies, we like to zone out on the elliptical, we like to go to the spa and be pampered as we relax and drift away to a place where there are no stresses in life and we can simply enjoy just sitting. Everyone needs this type of release and everyone has their own method of getting what they need.
Sunday football can be a healthy escape from reality for your husband. The pressures of life must always find a way to be released. Men typically need the opportunity to do nothing – a reason to temporarily tune out the world’s stresses and fantasize about a competition in which he can relish in the glory of a win or disconnect from a loss he wasn’t involved in. There is not only nothing wrong with that, it is necessary and needed in order to regroup, refill and reset. Just because he needs this does not mean he does not need you. This can be a chance for you to join your husband and gain closeness and connect on his level, as I’m sure you would like for him to do for you. If you feel ignored, if you feel he is more interested in sports than you, your family or your household, that is something that is inside of you, it is yours to own and fix and you can do that by looking inside of yourself instead of blaming your spouse. Allow him to exit from reality for a short while, join him even if you don’t enjoy the sport itself, the gesture will go a long way. This enables him to get his needs met and to de-stress so that he will be more capable of meeting your needs and supporting you as you work toward teaching yourself that you are worthy, you are noticed and you are loved.