Everyone who knows me knows that I have terrible taste. Just this past week, I went to a bar and asked the bartender to “just mix some pineapple juice in” with my wine because it wasn’t sweet enough. I love TV shows that some might consider “bad.” I love The Bachelor, and I cry at every episode of World of Dance. So when I say that bad TV shows are bad for your relationship, “bad” is subjective. In a relationship context, “bad TV” is any show that isn’t interesting to at least one of you. It’s any TV show that you’re fine missing, that you don’t care if your partner watches without you, or that you guys have seen a half dozen times before.
Watching bad TV together is a classic sign that you’re in a rut. Relationships, like most worthwhile things, are mostly boring endeavors punctuated with fleeting moments of excitement like your wedding and the time you guys fucked in your friend’s cool shower while house-sitting for them. That is to say that every relationship falls into ruts—like, a lot. People in good relationships work to navigate out of these ruts, while people in mediocre relationships either don’t notice or don’t act to fix them.
There’s a song by an artist named Rodriguez (whom you may recognize from the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man) in which he asks, “How much of you is repetition?” It’s devastating to realize how many things you do in a day are the same things you did the day before. I’m not trying to push you into an existential spiral or anything, I’m just pointing out that watching TV that one or both of you isn’t into is a bad habit. Taking turns watching each other’s shows is great in the beginning of a relationship, when every opinion your partner has ever even briefly held fascinates you; years into a relationship, however, sitting down and half-watching another episode of Stranger Things while doing a deep dive on a high school acquaintance’s Instagram is a problem.
The solution? Watch these shows on your own. If you’re jazzed to watch The Handmaid’s Tale but she finds it too depressing, or if you’ll stab your eyes out if you have to watch Joanna Gaines hang more shiplap on Fixer Upper, watch separate things. It’s not 1954; you can watch almost anything, anytime. Agreeing to watch divisive shows alone carries the added benefit of ensuring that you have your own down time, separate from each other. It’s easy to make an effort to have a vivid social life beyond your partner, but it’s harder to make time to be a blob of shit on the couch without your partner. Give yourself the gift of a show that is entirely yours, and stop subjecting your girlfriend to Ozark.
Don’t watch everything separately—co-binge-watching on shows is the second-best thing about being in a relationship (second only to having someone who can talk you down from your most recent WebMD “diagnosis.”) The point is to save shows that feel like events for when you’re together. If I found out that my boyfriend had watched Killing Eve without me, I’d ruin his life. Killing Eve is a show we pause when one of us goes to the bathroom. That’s the kind of down time to spend with your partner; pick shows you want to talk about and dissect together. Don’t reinforce the mundanity of everyday life by settling in to your fifth viewing of the earthquake episode of Modern Family.
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