Certain terms are simply not in your vernacular when you’re married. In 2015, I called my single friend Debbi and said, this guy texted asking if I wanted to Netflix and chill tonight. Is there some meaning behind this that I don’t know about? Is Netflixing and chilling a thing?
“How many dates have you been on?” she asked.
“Including the coffee? Two,” I responded.
“Two? Ok, Netflix and chill is NOT him asking you to come over and watch a Nelly Bly documentary. Get some good lingerie. Maybe get waxed,” she quipped.
“Thanks, Deb,” I said with an eye roll.
Pondering whether I even wanted to Netflix and chill with this guy, got me to thinking about the TV and movie watching in my marriage, or the lack of it.
My ex-husband and I had always gone out to the movies together a few times a month, but as the marriage started going downhill, I found myself so jealous of friends who had these great bonding times with their partners watching favorite shows together.
It was undeniable that my husband’s and my interests diverged more and more as the years went on. He didn’t like camping, hiking, biking, nature, or my friends. I didn’t like watching UCLA basketball. But something as simple as watching our favorite shows together? Why couldn’t we do even this one simple thing? And truth be told—did we have favorite shows together? No, we didn’t.
When I first heard of House of Cards in 2013, I said to my husband, “Hey, there’s this great new show with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright Penn that looks interesting; let’s watch it together!” He informed me that he had already binged the entire first season by himself in the man cave when he worked out every morning at 5:30 a.m. Oh! Ok. Right.
Then there was Girls. He hated that show with a vengeance. If I were watching an episode in the bedroom, he would enter the room and announce, as a matter of fact, that the show was terrible, the writing was atrocious, and these so-called actors could not act their way out of a paper bag. These were not opinions, mind you; they were simply stated as facts by the resident screenwriter and producer husband.
His opinion of me, sitting there laughing at the raw and real trials of Hannah, Adam, Shoshanna, and the other 20-something Brooklynites, obviously dropped a notch. Or two.
So I took to watching Girls on the sly when he was working late or writing out back in the man cave and I could belly laugh, uninhibited, with my Pinot and oat pretzels in a judgment-free zone.
And the chasm between us only widened. Could our marriage be saved by McDreamy, McSteamy, or even a shared appreciation of a post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme? Probably not. But there is something to be said for making an effort to enjoy activities together, which is something my friends in happier marriages had figured out how to do at home via the small screen.
As I started to research this subject post-mortem, (years after the divorce), it turns out that bonding over TV shows with your significant others can be an undeniable boon for a marriage.
Why is that, you might be wondering?
Couples That Watch TV Together, Stay Together
Remember Cheers, where everybody knows your name? We all knew their names, and just seeing their funny, familiar faces on TV in the days when people used to tune in with their remote at 8:00 p.m. together was a comfort. That comfort helped Cheers become one of the longest-running TV shows of all time.
Whether or not you and your partner share a big group of common friends, one study found when couples emotionally connect with TV show characters together, it’s similar to sharing a friend group, thus strengthening their relationship.
Another study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that couples who watch TV shows together experience a deeper connection thanks to a shared interest in the plots and characters.
Can watching TV shows with a partner improve communication? I turned to Wendy Paris, wellness blogger and author of Splitopia: Dispatches from Today’s Good Divorce and How to Part Well for answers, and she offered an interesting perspective on how we sit while watching TV:
“There’s definitely research on how sitting side by side, like a father and son at a baseball game, can be a good setup for having a conversation about something that could be uncomfortable if you’re sitting eye to eye,” she offered.
“So relating that to this idea of couples sitting side by side on a couch, it could be an opportunity to broach a difficult conversation. Also, if you want to make a point to your partner—like how it would be helpful for him if he went to therapy—you could watch Ted Lasso, and after Ted goes to therapy, use the show as a modeling behavior.”
“If you want your partner to make a change, rather than criticizing him or trying to talk him into doing something, you can model the preferred behavior or be around someone modeling it. So you could use the show as an oblique way to show the value of therapy or to start a conversation about it.”
When I mentioned the friction in my marriage caused by the show Girls, Paris suggests in situations like that, rather than drawing a line in the sand and widening the chasm between us, I could have tried to open up a conversation to learn what it was about that show that upset him.
“It’s almost like art therapy, right? Where you use something else as a way to creatively explore and express feelings.” I liked this idea of using a situation creatively to broaden a conversation vs. escalating it to a place where we each get angry that the other one doesn’t share the same point of view.
Maybe there’s a way to appreciate your partner’s difference of opinion if it’s stated in a less abrasive way. After all, having a different perspective than your spouse is inevitable. An interesting article in the New York Times talks about how exploring privilege, perspective, and other lived experiences leads to breakthroughs at home.
Dr. Orna Guralnik discusses how recent events have reshaped the national conversation on power, privilege, gender norms, whiteness, and systemic racism. She notes: “These insights have also made it easier for people to realize there may be plenty of other unconscious assumptions undergirding their positions. I’ve been surprised and excited by the impact of this new understanding, and it has all made my work as a couples therapist easier.”
Getting back to the sexy insinuation of the term Netflix and chill, you could definitely kick up the heat in your married sex life a few notches by watching a fun, sexy TV show or movie together.
It’s hard to imagine getting through Y Tu Mama Tambien with your significant other and not wanting to jump each other’s bones during or after the film. In fact, I would say that this movie should be the litmus test to determine whether there’s any spark left. If you turn off the TV and you’re both exhausted and not the least bit turned on after watching Y Tu Mama Tambien, it’s possible that you really can’t Netflix and chill.
If that’s the case, use the Y Tu Mama Tambien episode as a lead-in to a difficult conversation about the passion in your marriage. If you want to spice things up and you’re not sure if he even wants to bother—that’s a problem! But if you express interest in wanting to spice things up, he may appreciate you opening up that difficult conversation.
You can then have a productive talk about where things are at and where each of you would like them to be, and then start talking about how to get there.
So if sexy-time or simple togetherness is something you’d like more of in your marriage, binge on some shows with your significant other. Laugh together at Natasha Lyonne’s wise-cracking female Columbo character in Poker Face. Or groove on nostalgic 70s LA in actual Columbo reruns! Be awed by the depths of dysfunctionality (and excellent acting of Melissa McCarthy, Regina Hall, Bobby Cannavale, and company) in Nine Perfect Strangers, or challenge each other to find one single likable feature of any of the characters in Succession. It might be a magical bonding experience. And it’s much cheaper than couples therapy.
Rebecca Cullen is a Los Angeles based essayist, screenwriter, and copywriter. She started out as an assistant to the writers of Poltergeist and Marked for Death. She then went on to sell original pilots, pitch jokes with Jimmy Caan, and has currently put her cynicism aside to write a romance for the Hallmark Channel. Rebecca is raising two extraordinary boys, Aidan and Beckett, and shares part-time custody of one confused dog, Buddy. She is a transplanted New Yorker living gluten-free in Southern California, except for key lime pie at the Galley.