My husband is such a liar.
I mean, his particular brand of lying is relatively innocuous, but still.
“I feel your pain,” my mother says to me when I tell her about his wrongdoing. “Your father did the same thing to me.”
What I’m talking about here is sports. Specifically the fact that when we met, he claimed to not follow them. A fact that, until learning the truth, I was pretty thrilled about.
And look, I had good reason to believe him. He once texted me after a pickup game of softball that he had “scored so many points!” Points. He called them points.
“It always starts this way,” my mom says. “When your father and I were first dating, he would read me Shakespeare love sonnets over the phone and declare that sports were silly. But soon enough, there he was, yelling at the television on Sunday afternoons.”
I always knew Evan loved his home state, Wisconsin, and therefore had affection for teams from Wisconsin (the Packers and the Badgers), but until recently, I didn’t know that he actually pays attention to the details of the current rosters and understands football strategy. I didn’t know that, like my father, he has the capacity to yell at the television. That was his dirty little secret.
“It’s not football! It’s the Packers!” he insists.
“Do the Packers play football?”
“Well, yes.”
“So, we’re still talking about football.”
But when you love someone, you must find a way to accept them, flaws, lies, well-disguised differences, and all. That is why, since we got together, I have found myself in more than one Packers bar (they are in nearly every city, it turns out), and that is why I hugged him as he cried real tears during “the Pack’s” tragic loss to the Seahawks during the playoffs in 2015. And it’s also why, for every Super Bowl, I rustle up my sports-lovin’ man and his sports-lovin’ friends (who probably also duped their partners like Evan did me) a special Super Bowl snack spread.
But, as with every other party in this book, I never do it all myself.
First, I tell everyone to bring beer. That’s the most appropriate thing to drink while you watch sports, right? I think? All I know is that it would really suck to run out of it (and in my experience, when sports lovers are engaged in sports watching, they’re usually unwilling to get off the couch and reup the brewskis). And ask one or two people to grab a few fun nonalcoholic drinks; it’s always good to have alternatives.
Also pick up or instruct peeps to bring a few fun crunchy snacks like popcorn, tortilla chips, and nuts.
Now here’s your menu, whether you are a Sporty Sally or, like me, more of an Acquiescing Anna: