🎬 When You Can’t Decide What to Watch

Back in the day, Bob and I would look forward to weekends. Settling in with the kids and watching a movie together. We had a whole philosophy about it. There’s so much trash out there, we’re going to expose them to classics, or at least the movies we loved. The ones they’d never pick on their own.

The ritual was always the same. Pile into the car. Go to Blockbuster with the three kids. The baby had no vote, but the other two definitely did. And we would spend, I kid you not, an hour or longer just trying to pick a movie.

The pressure was intense. It had to be the perfect movie.

The kids had their ideas. We had ours. No one could agree. Ever. So we’d usually leave with two or three movies, just in case we didn’t like the first one. It took forever.

Which is why I had to laugh recently when I visited my now adult kids, and our nightly activity was… watching movies. With streaming and all that, so much easier now, right? Wrong. We decided to start discussing the movie before dinner. Get ahead of it. Be efficient.

One night, by the time we landed on Death to Smoochy, it was basically bedtime. Thank God we all loved it.

I’ve thought about creating a system. One person picks. Done. Well, that’s not going to work with this group. Start the conversation in the morning? Maybe, but probably not.

Here’s what I’m realizing: All this is not really just about the movie. It’s the talking about it. The back and forth, the opinions, the negotiation. The shared time of trying to land on something together. The movie is just the excuse. I’m going to go with that because apparently, no matter how old the kids are, or we are, we’ll probably always treat picking a movie like it’s a life decision.