The Wannabe

***Warning: This post is about my wife, who I love dearly but sometimes drives me crazy***

When it comes to movies, I’m not picky. I’ll watch just about anything, even if I don’t like it. In fact, even if I HATE the movie, I’m usually still entertained by it. From horror to romantic comedy, to me it’s all art and art deserves to be given a fair chance. My wife, on the other hand, is VERY picky about movies. There are whole genres that she absolutely refuses to watch. These include horror, anime, “monster” movies, most suspense-thrillers, and she usually has to be talked into action movies that have any sort of supernatural element. She also tends to judge movies based on small, seemingly insignificant elements. For example, she hates Finding Nemo because Nemo’s mother dies in the beginning and she doesn’t like The Break-Up because they don’t end up together in the end. She generally doesn’t stray from her preferred genres, which are romantic comedy’s and teen movies.

While this may not seem like a big deal, it’s turned out to be the bane of my movie watching experience. When we rent movies, we always rent two. The deal is I can pick one movie that I want and she can pick one movie that she wants. But picture this: we’re in the movie rental store, trying to select two movies to rent. My wife gravitates towards the latest Mandy Moore nightmare movie and states that that’s the one she wants. I shrug, indicating that I don’t like it but I’ll watch it because she wants to watch it. I then pick up the next horror movie I find with a catchy title, to which she responds, “You can get what you want, but I won’t watch it with you.” Yay! Watching a movie by myself! How fun is that?!

And this is where the true problem shines through. She knows that I’ll watch anything! Anything she picks up, low-budget independent movies, romantic comedies that were only in theaters for a day or two, movies that were made for (and appear to be written by) 15-year-old girls, I’ll watch it. But she also knows that I HATE watching movies alone! So all she has to do is tell me that she won’t watch it with me and she knows I won’t get it! That means that even though we each get to select one movie, what really ends up happening is she selects one movie that she wants to watch but I don’t, and I select one movie that we both want to watch. She gets two movies but I only get one that I’m usually not even that excited about! It drives me crazy!!

*It should be noted that my wife has been a good sport about a lot of movies, such as Logan’s Run and Tron. However, with all the Mandy Moore crap that I’ve watched with her, this hardly makes up for it.