Why Super Mario 3D World might quite possibly saved my love life.

My husband doesn’t get me. I’ve known this… I’m a complicated stress ball of a woman and at times a bit demanding. Like any woman I appreciate romantic gestures or thoughtful gifts. Which is why last Christmas when my husband gifted me with a Wii U I was honestly a little confused. Please don’t get me wrong I knew how great of a gift it was! But I don’t game…

I should have kept my confusion to myself and gratefully accepted the gift with a smile and a thank you. But rather I chose to use this incident as an example of the aforementioned fact that my husband just doesn’t get me. This of course sparked argument because he was understandably butt hurt that I didn’t appreciate his highly awesome gift.

Part of my gift was that I could use his gamely account to find games I liked. I filled our queue with Wii U games of all sorts but a year went by without us receiving a single one. We didn’t really have the money to buy a ton of accessories so I just didn’t use it. Then it stopped working…. And Thomas forgot to send it in for repairs.

One year after my ungrateful wife episode, with a fully functioning WiiU and our first actual WiiU game we get from our queue: Super Mario 3D world! We invested in a WiiU Pro controller, dug up an old remote, and had a good old fashioned Nintendo party.

Having grown up on original NES Mario bros this game was natural to pick up. The pro controller fit my hands like it was molded, weighted perfectly. Bouncing off my fellow Mario bros characters was fun and silly. Then… we discovered the cat suits…

All Mario worlds are fun to explore. We all enjoy delving their secret covers and discovering their elusive hidden cheats. But let me tell you, having explored 3D as a Princess Peach kitty that paddles through the air as she floats to hard to reach platforms, I never want it any other way!

Each time we picked the game up we added another pro controller to our stash and by the time my good friend Jordan birthday arrived we were ready for some serious Mario 3D fun. It was one of the best nights with friends that I have had in recent memory. My favorite part of the night was when Jordan said “I’m a kitty! And I’m wearing a crown! And it’s my birthday!”

This was around the time I began eating some serious crow. I admitted my terribly ungrateful wifeliness and how truly awesome the gift Thomas gave me was. He gave me the gift of play! And he chooses to play with me all the time. Sometimes we share with our friends and sometimes we play just the two of us. And we never run out of lives because he found the tortoise shell trick in level 1-2!

My point is not that my husband is awesome at video games (though he is) or that WiiU is only fun if you buy a bunch or controllers and accessories, but that the gifts that truly fulfill us are the ones that cause us to work together, explore, build, fight, and play together.

Now I understand that it wasn’t him not getting me at all. I somehow didn’t see that in giving me a game console he thought I would like, he was expressing a desire to play with me.