I feel like a man again

As some of you may know, my amazing and beautiful wife Amy is very good at video games. A more than small percentage of our Sunday afternoons are spent as a family watching my wife play our Xbox 360. As she completes game after game of all sorts of genres, her Gamerscore continues to rise. It is one's Gamerscore by which you judge yourself against other gamers. My wife's score is approximately 50% larger than my own.

This causes some degree of emotional distress for me. I am sure some other husbands who count video games as one of their favorite past times that could sympathize with me if they were to put themselves in my shoes. If you are not one of those husbands, just imagine if you wife spanks you each week as fantasy football or at golf, straight up, playing from the same tees with no handicaps. Or imagine if your wife frequently fixed your car because you were too inept. While some of these things sound fun for a while, almost as a novelty, after a while of getting your butt handed to you, it gets a little old.

For example, I was playing online with a few friends from work. We were playing Call of Duty 4 and I was playing very well that evening. Typically I can hold my own and finish in the middle of the pack. However, this fine evening, I found myself consistently finishing at or near the top. I was destroying all those poor souls who dared enter the arena of death that I was creating. After one noticeably lopsided victory for me, one of my friends asked me if I had given the controller to Amy that evening. Everyone agreed that this was not only an appropriate explanation for my dominance but possibly the only explanation.

I have resigned my household claim as "Superior Gamer" with more than a slight pain in my heart. It's hard to feel like the man of the house when your wife can beat Halo 3 on Legendary and you can't get pass the Tvaso Highway level on the same difficulty. Or when she kills you 34 times in a row with a plasma gun and you have a Gravity Hammer and a Rocket Launcher.

However, there are some times in which it is good to be a man in my house. There are moments, brief glorious moments, that typically involved driving things, when my wife cannot get past a certain level and my skills are requested. Typically, I am in the office reading comics or some other unmasculine activity when I get the call. I run in, and complete the task typically 6 or 7 tries. I then take a moment to bask in the love and gratitude of my wife and kids until I make a quick exit back to the office, feeling a bit more strong and a bit more swagger in my steps.

Yeah, I got mad skills and she knows it...unless she just does that to make me feel good about myself...