You might think that binge-watching shows on Netflix with your significant other is a good idea.
You spend a relaxing night in your apartment with your hubby, drinking wine, eating Chinese food and watching five straight hours of Frank Underwood plot and scheme to take over Washington. It sounds lovely.
But you might want to pump the brakes on those weekend plans, kiddo, because binge-watching with your boyfriend or girlfriend may be legitimately terrible for your relationship.
Let me explain.
Firstly, binge-watching will wreak havoc on your body. Extensive TV viewing has been linked to obesity and adult onset diabetes. A study conducted by Harvard’s School of Public Health found that
For every two hours the women [who participated in the study] spent watching television each day, they had a 23 percent higher risk of becoming obese and a 14 percent higher risk of developing diabetes.
Even more disconcerting, the study found that the risk of early death increased by 13 percent for every two hours spent watching TV on a daily basis.
Basically, no one wants to be with an obese diabetic who’s going to keel over in two years while watching “True Blood.”
Oh, and another thing, a correlation has been found between binge-watching and erectile dysfunction. According to a study published in the American Journal of Medicine,
Men who watch 3 or more hours of TV per day are more likely to experience erectile dysfunction than men who only watch 1 hour or less per day.
So, yeah, too much Frank Underwood can prevent you from getting wood down under. (Nailed it!)
Binge-watching with your significant other will also mess with your mind.
Binging is essentially an addictive behavior that causes your brain to release dopamine and may cause you to become reliant upon the activity.
It’s obviously not as detrimental as consuming hard drugs or alcohol, but certainly a chemical dependence can begin to form. It’s not hard to see how this could cause some strain in your relationship.
From a less scientific standpoint, binge-watching a show like “Breaking Bad” can distance you from reality. That, I suppose, is the point of binge-watching, but it can have some deleterious effects on your real-world relationship.
For one thing, you begin to form bonds with characters whom you “spend” such a large chunk of time with.
Your “relationship” with Jesse Pinkman may take away from your relationship with your boyfriend. And your girlfriend is never going to be as whimsical and adorable as Jess from “New Girl.”
What’s more, life generally isn’t as consistently interesting as TV. There aren’t meticulously crafted story-lines involving drug kingpins and mob bosses in the real world.
Sure, crazy things happen every day, but rarely do they occur as frequently in your daily life as they do in a given episode of “The Sopranos.”
This may cause you to become disillusioned with your station in life and with the person you’ve been lying next to for the past eight hours.
Also, when you finally do finish a show, you may suffer from a sort of postpartum depression. You’ll feel sadness and longing and the comfort of your significant other may not be enough to fill that void.
Plus, no one wants to be with a sad sack who’s moaning over the loss of a fictional character. (Even if it is Ned Stark and even if his death was totally unfair. Why did you do it Joffrey?! Why?!)
That’s not to say you shouldn’t watch Netflix anymore. Only lunatics conflate fiction and reality.
I’m just advocating that you binge-watch in moderation, which, I understand, is more than a little paradoxical.
If you’re going to do it (and I know you are), try to separate the time you spend binge-watching from the time you spend with your significant other.
Your health and the health of your relationship may depend on it.
