The ultimate football wife

As soon as you get married, you get your very own key to a whole new vault of humorous material. No longer an outsider at the adults table, you can now laugh along with cagey old-timers when they open a joke with "take my wife" and follow a delicious pause with the word "please." You can giggle nervously at punchlines implying married women don't give blowjobs. You can beg out of Wednesday bar nights with the "old lady" excuse, and then get hazed by your buddies for a week afterwards. Your friends get a key to new material too, and use it mostly to make jokes about your balls being in a variety of strange places - a jar on the mantle, your wife's purse, her pocket, a glass on the nightstand, etc.

Those jokes are made for a reason. There are many activities that men and women enjoy doing together, like sex, tennis and pointing at the hordes of Jewish people on La Brea (do they ALL work in jewelry??). But men and women often disagree on how to spend their time, and this is a source of great conflict in many marriages. One such conflict source in my own marriage has been football.

And not the cute ha-ha conflict like I get upset because she thinks Chad Pennington's ass looks amazing, or do you have to wear that Brett Favre halter to sleep when you know I'm a Ditka man. It's like every Sunday is my childhood Christmas morning all over again, and she's like I can't believe I married this buffoon of a man-child who is capable of spending 12 hours on the couch watching this colossally stupid game and eating himself into a meat coma by the time I get home from my mani pedi. Yes, in the past, we have seen this great American pastime through slightly different colored glasses.

Perhaps it's our contrasting upbringings. Like Annie Savoy worships in the Church of Baseball, so do I seek my religion on the gridiron. Sundays are for football - period. The wife's church is actually a church.

I grew up in a house full of brothers and a father who ate, slept and breathed sports. If there weren't balls in our hands we barely knew who we were, and I mean that totally the opposite of how Liberace would. The wife grew up with a father and brother who can build cars with their bare hands and tell you the make, model and year after hearing an ignition from 100 yards, but have never taken so much as a passing interest in sport.

Her mom can watch a game for a few minutes and then tell me what sport is being played, and she's right about half the time. My mom can tell you who was playing in the AFC title game in 1984. Then again, her ears aren't pierced and comparisons have been drawn between her wardrobe and Steven Segal's.

These things aren't good or bad, just different. Except the Steven Segal thing - that's awful.

Not that the wife and I haven't tried to compromise - "pick a team," I'll say. Which mascot is your favorite? Which player's backstory is the most interesting? Do you enjoy gambling? A couple years of this came and went without much progress. Not because she wasn't making the effort, but it just didn't seem to resonate. She still viewed the game as something separate that she didn't understand and didn't want any part of. Like Ben Affleck and quality films, or Paris Hilton and underwear. She just didn't need football.

Then, an amazing thing happened. Well, two amazing things actually. The first was the installation of a satellite dish on the roof of our condo. An installation we would find out only weeks later violated strict homeowner's association policy against rooftop installations, which was doubly frowned on seeing as we were renting our condo. The second thing was the purchase of a 51 inch high definition television. This potent combination didn't directly bring football into the wife's Sunday routine, but it did bring between 6 and 10 of my friends into our living room every Sunday.

Mostly because games begin at 10 AM, the wife would spend part of her day with us around the sweet new TV flipping through 10 games at a time. She would leave midway through the morning, and return late in the afternoon to find us generally as she left us, plus 10 beers and a few pounds of meat and chips. After 20 weekends of this routine, she had grown pretty used to it. She wasn't yet up to honest enjoyment, but she didn't hate the group of us sitting around, and was aware now that we didn't speak only in X's and O's. In fact, she was able to obtain more information about my friends' lives in these Sunday football sessions than ever before - it was almost like we were capable of watching the games and talking at the same time. The channel flipping was a bit much though, and she wasn't able to really watch a game for a long enough period of time to care about its outcome.

Flash forward to last season. Still had the TV, but the homeowners had long since removed our satellite, which meant no DirecTV and no NFL package. We had a smaller crowd, and less channel flipping, and the wife grew fonder still of our regular Sunday gatherings. She would make the effort to ask questions about the games and the players, and though her knowledge of the game was still rudimentary, she could recognize and remark insightfully on what a poor gambler I seemed to be. She clearly understood that there are 3 games a day - the morning, afternoon and evening game, and was almost tolerant of the 12 hours of dedicated football watching the network schedule demanded.

I had changed my habits as a fan too, to better suit our married life. We were entering our 4th season together, and I understood that just because we were sitting around together watching football, the wife might not consider that to be "quality time" the way that I might. So I'd make the effort to make sure we had that time in addition to whatever football time I wanted for the weekend, and to make sure she understood that our relationship always comes first. And a funny thing happened - she started to hate football less and less.

Now this season we're living in Los Angeles. As the season approached, there was a deafening silence as the wife didn't vocally bemoan the onset of "our Sundays disappearing." We were spending plenty of time together watching our son try to kick his way out of her belly a few months ahead of schedule, and enjoying talking trash together about LA traffic, LA smog, LA insurance prices and LA people. Yesterday, we arrived together at Barney's Beanery a half hour before the early games to make sure we got the best booth to watch the Redskins game. We were the second in the door at 9:30 on a Sunday morning. The wife was by my side with her US Magazine, not a single complaint to be heard.

As I sat across the table from my 7 months pregnant wife, taking down my first ColinMosa of the morning, I couldn't help but smile at how far we have come, and how lucky I am. I had the same thought later that night while we watched the evening game around a bucket of chips and salsa, and again on Monday while we watched Monday Night Football. Were there walks, dinners, viewings of "Queer Eye" and trips to BabyLand mixed in between? You bet there were. And I was happy to do it. A few years ago, the wife hated everything football represented, and directly resented how the amount of time I spent watching it poached from the bucket of time we spent together. Now, I make sure she knows she comes first all the time, and she makes the effort to hang out and watch football with me, and to learn about the game.

This could all be just clever planning to bone up on her sports knowledge in anticipation of our son's arrival and the onset of a lifetime of ball-related activities. But I choose to believe that we're growing as people, and meeting each other in the middle on something that once threatened to become a seriously contentious relationship issue. And in the end, everyone wins. We're both so much more conscious of each other's needs, and can talk about plans for our fall weekends without a mediator.

The wife has announced that she plans to love Notre Dame, but will never be "that girl" in the jersey and hat. And I don't care, because she didn't shut herself down the way she could have, or close off to the possibility that there's more to this game than meets the eye - there's time with friends, time with each other, meat, point spreads and fantasy stats. She's made the effort to understand something that is an important part of my life. So to me, she's already the ultimate football wife.