A Good Sport

by Gwen Cooper — September 7, 2007

I remember my mother once telling me that she'd spent the first year or so of her "courtship" with my father pretending to be a huge football fan for the sake of impressing him. I have no idea what the eventual conversation was like, but I would imagine that it was something of a rude awakening for my father to discover, after the ceremony, that my mom had no interest in ever attending another game with him again. I don't judge my mother too harshly, however--that's how things were done back then. Plus, given the taboos on sex before marriage, why not go to football games? What else was there for the two of you to do together anyhow?

Football season is once again upon is, and Robert is a Jets season ticket-holder. I'm sure my winter will be filled with Sundays spent alone--or, at least, without him. Robert and his friends are big tailgaters, which means that even a game starting at 4:00 becomes an all-day affair.

There are women who are bothered by such things, although I can't say I'm especially annoyed at the prospect of some extra free time by myself on the weekends coming up. I can't (and won't) pretend any particular interest in football. But I have no desire, as many of the other girlfriends and wives seem to, to curtail the number of days and hours Robert spends grilling meat with his buddies in the Meadowlands parking lot this winter.

Perhaps allowing Robert a hassle-free football season seems like such a mild indulgence because of the worse "sports widow" horror stories I've been through. I once lived with a man for three years who was addicted to every sport--football, basketball, hockey, soccer, baseball, you name it. Sports widowhood is the kind of thing that can be tolerable when there's a finite end to things; you can live through having only half your man's attention during basketball season because at least you can figure out an approximate date when basketball season will be over and life can go back to "normal." When you're with someone who's rabid about every professional team sport, however, there is no "normal." You eventually find, much to your dismay, that with the exception of maybe one or two months out of the year, everything on your social calendar as a couple (even if it's just a quiet dinner out for two) revolves entirely around game schedules. After about the sixth time I had to pass up plans with other couples, or was told I didn't have time to order dessert in a restaurant because a game was about to start and we had to get home to see it, it got very old.

They say if you can't beat 'em, you should join 'em--but I think there's also the option of a middle ground. I can't bring myself to feign an interest in football as my mother did, but I also can't quite bring myself to give Robert a hard time about the hours he spends at the football stadium like some of the other women do. If their boyfriends and husbands are only obsessed with the one game, they should consider themselves lucky. I know firsthand that things could always be much--much--worse.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.