Jun 27, 2021 8:00 AM

Gaming With My Husband Made Our Marriage Stronger

All it took was buying a Nintendo Switch.

WHEN IT COMES to video games and marriages, it’s usually not good news. Pop culture, books, and movies are littered with anecdotes or comedy sketches about a scorned, frazzled wife being dumped by her husband for the latest video game.

I can picture it now: Usually the wife comes into her husband’s dark, dank gaming den in some wildly uncomfortable lingerie in an effort to seduce the bleary-eyed, caffeine-laden husband off some game or another. It ends in screams and rough and tumble—but not the good kind.

Not in my case, though. I swear that playing video games with my husband of two years, Jethro, now 27, has actually made our marriage stronger—and now I feel closer to him than ever.

When the coronavirus pandemic shut down the world as we knew it in March 2020, Jethro and I hadn’t even been married a year. We spent our first wedding anniversary that summer locked in our small two-bed flat in London, lamenting what could have been. We exhausted everything: running, cookbooks, redecorating, our record collection, and the coffee. It got tense at times—this wasn’t a life for a newlywed couple, surely?

In all honesty, we’d never really gamed together before. Jethro liked difficult adventure games with impossible puzzles, logic, fighting, and big-ass weapons. I didn’t. I liked games with bright colors, friendships, and “doing good.” The closest I ever got to fighting and big-ass weapons was in Fallout 3, and even then I ran away from rabid dogs.

We like different things and have wildly different personalities, so gaming together was never considered. Jethro’s a numbers man; he’s cool, collected, and incredibly logical. I’m a creative, a writer, an overly sensitive Pisces with a terrible memory and zero logic. We're polar opposites when it comes to both life and gaming. So our gaming lives have been very separate, very personal to us individually, and we’d never had a chance to bond, or work together as a couple, when it came to our screen time.

Turns out we’re not alone. There have been a handful of studies over the years that have revealed the negative impact that gaming can have on marriages. Shockingly, in 2018, the website Divorce Online suggested that it saw a marked increase in Fortnite being cited as grounds for divorce among their users. Around 5 percent of all divorce papers it received that year claimed that the game had a role in breaking up their marriage.

In an earlier study, published in 2012 by the Journal of Leisure Research, researchers found that 75 percent of (often male) gamer’s spouses wished that the gamer in their relationship would put more effort into their marriage. They claimed it led to dissatisfaction in their relationship and arguments, as it got in the way of family time and intimacy.

However, the same study revealed that among couples who shared gaming time and played together, 76 percent felt gaming was good for their marriage. They were more satisfied in their relationship as they were on the same team. It revealed that working together works wonders.

So when it came to joining the hordes and buying a Nintendo Switch during lockdown last year, I was nervous. Skeptical, even. I was imagining playing on Animal Crossing until 4 am, picking peaches and swimming for clams while my husband slept alone in our bed, and vice versa. I worried that we’d fight over the console, and I would end up eating alone while my husband swore and sweated over fighting Dynamax Pokémon in Pokémon Shield.

I ended up watching him for hours trying to catch 150 Digletts on the game’s Isle of Armor expansion, and I felt myself getting irate—losing my patience over something that was meant to be pleasurable. I was snappy, had nothing but negative comments to offer on his playing style and technique, simply because I couldn’t get involved. At times, I ended up sitting farther and farther away from him on the sofa, resenting the console that was supposed to be ours. That was until we purchased 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

I still believe that Breath of the Wild is a force to be reckoned with in the gaming world—it is truly a digital masterpiece, a pioneer and a figurehead for change. When I first sat down with my husband to watch him play this new game—advertised as an endless quest, with trials and difficult tasks on the way—I won’t lie, I was nervous for our marriage.

When it came to him completing the game’s Shrine Quests, I held my breath. They were a mixture of fighting trials and numeric and logical puzzles, and I thought I had nothing to offer him as a creative person, but we ended up working together: as a team.

I’d spot pieces of the puzzles from a creative lens that he completely missed, and I’d offer him advice and solutions to problems along the way. He started to thank me for my input and began to respect me in an entirely different way—not as his opposite, but as his teammate.

Every night during lockdown we’d look at each other and say one word: “Zelda?” It ended up being like our date night in a time of solitude. Gaming together, as a team, offered us a new type of collaboration, a dependency on each other, and ultimately physical proximity on the sofa together. I’d reward him with high-fives and silly kisses, and he’d beam with pride at having accomplished something with my help.

I actually looked forward to sitting on the sofa together under a blanket and watching him play—even if I didn’t get my turn on Animal Crossing for hours, days even. I was content just being close to him and offering my crucial advice when he didn’t think he needed it.

Playing as a team has taught me how to be more patient with my husband, to enjoy being in his company and to realize the value of my worth to him, as a life companion and as a gamer. He’s now realized the value of asking me for help, and he cherishes my input. Now, when he plays Zelda, I often laugh: “You'd be so screwed on this game without me!” And he agrees.

It’s opened our eyes to playing together as a team, which according to online relationship therapist Charisse Cooke is a really positive, beneficial thing for our marriage, and she recommends others follow suit.

“As humans we are naturally competitive,” Charisse told WIRED. “In a situation where couples are either competing against each other, or joining as a team against others, this can be a bonding experience. The hormones that are released in the brain are the feel-good chemicals that kick-start our most primitive drives—for closeness, bonding, and exhilaration.”

“Returning to a place of playfulness, competitiveness or even rivalry, can ignite or reignite the spark and chemistry between couples,” she says.

It must be working as, now, Jethro and I forego a date night at the pub to play multiplayer games, conquer quests together—or even for him to thrash my ass on Mario Kart 8. But instead of tearing us apart, it’s brought us closer together than ever before, and I truly believe that it will make us better team players in handling real-life trials and tribulations in the future.

I never thought I’d say it, but I’m grateful to a games console for making my marriage stronger, and more solid, than ever.