My name is Heather and I’m a video game widow.

Ever since school got out for Christmas break and the Dork Lord brought home Call of Duty: Black Ops, the agenda in our home has been set by a couple of dead presidents, Fidel Castro and a host of the undead.  If he’s not lounging on the couch with a PS3 controller and a Bluetooth headset, he’s at his friend’s house – staying up until the wee hours in the morning mainlining snack foods and shooting zombies. And I freaking hate it.

Lately, I’ve been overwhelmed by the feeling that outside of grocery shopping together on Sunday afternoon, we live entirely separate lives. So instead of holing up in my office when I hear the PS3 come on, I try to engage – curl up on the couch with my Nook and read, even help with strategy or “there’s a zombie behind you” – but there’s really only so much I can take. It’s loud and violent. Holy cow.  And it’s a stupid video game, for Nintendo’s sake. But mostly, its complete saturation of my household makes me wonder what happened to the man I got engaged to, because  this 17-year-old convenience store clerk who’s living on my couch? Not a suitable replacement.

The thing is, I can’t decide if my expectations for grown-up man behavior are justified or  old fashioned and out of line, because when he’s on his third consecutive hour of killing zombies with pre-teen trash-talkers who repeatedly refer to each other as “bitch” or “n-” and I’m watching our precious weekend pissing slowly away, silently screaming, THIS CANNOT BE MY LIFE, the Boy seems to think nothing of it. His friends spend hours playing video games. This is normal.

“You’re a grown ass man. Doesn’t it tell you something that most of your teammates are rednecks whose testicles are still located on the INSIDE of their bodies?”

He remains nonplussed.

Maybe it is becoming the norm. Watch an hour or two of house hunting shows on HGTV and the words, “man cave” will be uttered now fewer than six times. Man cave. Really? My dad did not have a man cave. He didn’t have a TV that cost as much as a small foreign car or multiple gaming systems, either.  He had a workbench and thick Clive Cussler novels from the public library. His game was cribbage. I don’t think I’d be too far off in assuming that your dads didn’t have special rooms for avoiding their families and watching the Knicks or playing what, Duck Hunt? If anything, he might have had a special recliner, off limits to the kids, and that was that.

Take the TV dads from that era – Cliff Huxtable couldn’t get five minutes alone to watch a Saturday afternoon football game and, if memory serves, it didn’t once occur to him that he was entitled to. Yeah, sometimes, he’d sneak down to his doctor’s office in the basement and huddle up with a hoagie and a portable black and white TV, but eventually, he’d have to give that up because he promised to take Rudy to ballet or rake leaves or someshit – because that’s what grown ups do.

Oh, I get it – times have changed (and, fine, Doctor Huxtable wasn’t real) but this man cave having, video game playing version of adult male doesn’t sit all that well with me. Maybe I’m just unfun. Then again, I also seem to remember a scene in that Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn flick where she bailed on him for the very same behavior, which makes me think I’m not the only one who thinks that line between boy and man is just a wee bit too fuzzy for her comfort.

By the way, this is one of those posts where you’re supposed to tell me I’m not alone. So, uh, I’ll leave you to it.