- ask if I want to join her
- offer to share the blanket
- if I am in the room, ask what I want to watch
- if I am in the room, actually acknowledge my presence in any way
Her response when I tell her that we need to spend time together is usually something to the effect of "I don't have any problem with you sitting there." Of course, that is a pretty ridiculous response; this is my house, too, so I'm glad you don't mind that I sit where I please in it. More importantly, sitting in the same room together while the TV blares isn't really a joint activity. This is especially true if one person has no say in what is on, and the other person doesn't talk to him.
To be frank, watching stupid TV and playing on Facebook are all she really does at home if she isn't cooking, eating, or sleeping. After she gets up and gets dressed, she opens the computer and...spends the next thirty minutes on Facebook. If she has a day off, she catches up on the twenty hours or so of stuff she records in one week on the DVR (yes, that is actually accurate). Even if she is doing something else, like the laundry, one or both of these activities is also in progress. These activites are not bad in and of themselves, but they have killed our family life. The addiction to these things is so bad I have come to hate Facebook more than anything else on the planet. People ask me why I don't get on it. My wife is on there enough for both of us.
Lest you, gentle reader, think that these addictions are the only source of the problem, my wife will occasionally do something outside the house...but not with me or the kids. She will tell me at night that she "is exhausted," and "just wants to relax," and then the next day get up at 5:00 on her day off to go running with the neighbor. She will refuse to talk to me after 9:30, but will stay out with her friends at some restaurant (or maybe a bar) until 11:30 or midnight on a night she has to get up at 5:30 for work. No, her schedule is quite full, full of things that she actually wants to do.