EROTICA / SERIAL / MARRIAGE 2.0 / SEASON TWO
Marriage 2.0: Carrie and Ben #1
A brand new Marriage 2.0 story begins with the tale of a ‘Game Widow’, whose husband’s addiction threatens their marriage
Welcome to Marriage 2.0 — the modern relationship, upgraded. New to the series? Start with the Introduction >>
There was a designated term for what she was — Katie had told her about it only the previous week, and it instantly seemed like a perfect fit for her.
Carrie Weaver was a ‘Game Widow.’
Her husband hadn’t died — far from it. But sometimes, it seemed like he had. He was unreachable most of the time, incommunicado. He didn’t help around the house, spend time with her, didn’t chat about his day, or ask her about hers.
He wouldn’t even sit on the couch with her to watch TV together in the evening.
Carrie got home from work, fixed dinner for them both, and then ate hers alone before crashing in front of Netflix for a few hours until she felt sleepy enough for bed. She might see Ben momentarily as he slipped out of his den to pick up his dinner from the kitchen counter, but then he’d slink back away, and that would be it.
She might hear him through the thin walls of their little townhouse, chatting with other people playing his video game, but there wouldn’t be any conversation for her.
Ben was addicted to video games. He had been since college. When they’d first dated, she’d understood it — she’d even tried to be a part of it. It was more fun back then. He spent more time playing video games with friends in real life. His frat buddies all camped out on the couch playing Call of Duty, or whatever.
These days, he rarely saw his friends in real life. These days, his friends were all online. He didn’t even know any of their real names, for God’s sake, just their handles.
He’d managed to make a living from his video games obsession by playing through the live streaming platform Twitch, and cultivating a following and associated advertising income. He also took part in competitions. But it only meant he disappeared from Real Life even more.
She still loved him. Back in the old days, she’d been able to entice him away from his gaming for the occasional night out. She hadn’t needed much.
Back then, his college friends had been into things other than just video games, so he went too. These days, though, he’d gotten too accustomed to blowing them off for sketchy reasons, and they had gotten too used to not bothering to ask him if he wanted to do things with them.
Ironically, when they all got together once or twice a year, it seemed like Ben’s friends blamed marriage for the fact that he’d become less socially available in recent years.
So here she was, complaining to Katie about him in a coffee shop after work, and Katie declared her an irredeemable Game Widow.
‘God, you make it sound like it’s my fault,’ she’d told Katie, but it was strangely affirming that there was a word for people like her. It made her feel less isolated, less alone.
There were enough women who were like her that there was a word for it.
‘You have to be firm,’ Katie had told her. ‘There’s no other way. Give him a choice: your marriage or the video games.’
God. Everything seemed so simple when it wasn’t your problem, huh.
‘I can’t make him do that,’ she’d sighed. ‘It’s his whole career.’
‘He could still take it in a different direction. He needs to do something.’
Katie was one of those people who didn’t take things lying down. It meant she’d already been through two divorces at 28 years of age, but she rarely agonized about her relationships in the way normal people seemed to.
But sometimes Carrie got the feeling Katie was keen for her friends to follow suit. When Carrie shared her problems with her, Katie’s advice often seemed to push the idea that she should just walk out on Ben and join Tinder.
‘You don’t have to worry that you’ll never meet another guy again,’ she would point out. ‘You need to do things for yourself. If Ben won’t, there are countless men on dating sites who will.’
They had other friends who were married, but they were generally starting to pop out kids already. Lisa, Florence, Sara, Maddie. When Carrie talked to them, they seemed to want to push her into having kids.
‘You can’t understand how amazing, how life-affirming it is to have kids, if you’ve never had kids.’ Whatever.
But every time she was at home and feeling like giving Ben an ultimatum, she just got so horrifically sad.
She loved him.
His goofy smile, his sense of humor. The way he made her feel safe and secure. His general goodness. If you took away his video game addiction — and that was a big ask — he was a nice, kind guy. You knew he would never turn into that guy from The Shining.
She still found him attractive, too, when he remembered to shower and put on fresh underwear. Somehow he always ate crap and still seemed to manage to stay in shape. Carrie ate half a packet of chips and had to run five extra miles a week to keep it off.
There was therapy, of course. And that was easier than ever these days, with online services like Better Help. It felt cathartic to talk about her problems. The trouble was, it still came down to what she was going to do about them.
‘I should drag him to marriage counseling,’ Carrie would tell Dr. Shaw, knowing it would never happen. She wasn’t bold enough for that.
She was afraid that marriage counseling would mean the end of her marriage. That it would force Ben to make the choice that Katie had suggested: the video games or her.
When she thought about divorce, she just started thinking about all those friends and family members who had come to their wedding. So embarrassing. All those people made to feel they’d completely wasted a day attending Carrie and Ben’s nuptials.
When Carrie Googled the term ‘Game Widow,’ among the search results was a suggestion to use a service called ‘Marriage 2.0.’
She didn’t fully understand what the program was at first, when she scoured the website for information.
Marriage 2.0 had started in New York before the pandemic, but these days they had an office in San Francisco and 34 other major cities worldwide.
It seemed like a marriage counseling thing, but that didn’t involve counseling or therapy. They arranged ‘Experiences’ for couples designed to ‘dramatically’ improve their relationships and foster a strong romantic bond between spouses.
And you could sign up as a couple or as a married individual — since ‘married couples don’t always agree on what they might need.’
She liked the thought that she could sign up for the program without dragging Ben out of his troll cave — and she would still be able to get help for her ailing marriage.
Carrie took a day off to attend the San Francisco office, even though she could have had the assessment done all online. She preferred not to do it at home — even if there was only a tiny chance Ben might interrupt her evaluation.
So nervous, turning up at the office for her appointment.
But somehow, as soon as she entered the building, it didn’t seem too bad.
For one thing, there were a lot of other people around, apparently signing up for the program, too. Couples, individuals, people of all shapes and sizes. The place was light and airy and modern-looking, like a giant Apple Store.
Walking through the sales floor to the check-in desks, Carrie got the impression that this wasn’t only for couples whose marriages were in trouble. There were couples in healthy relationships here, too, to arrange fun adventures as though they simply wanted to go on a very different kind of vacation.
It meant she didn’t feel so self-conscious as she went through to check in for an appointment using a touch-screen kiosk.
Then she had to go to a waiting room that seemed just like an airport terminal, complete with flatscreen displays indicating when and where people needed to go for their appointments.
Her assessment was in a little room one floor up. It started out like some kind of medical exam, or perhaps like a sight test at the optician.
They rigged her up to some kind of advanced medical machine or computer — a special helmet going over her head, monitoring bracelets going around her wrists, electrodes stuck onto her skin in various places to detect changes in her heart rate or whatever.
Once she was all connected up, they put some virtual reality glasses on her, and started showing her images and movie clips of various things.
At first, it seemed like they were showing her random things. The technician, Sally, explained that they were measuring her basic levels.
Then, when they were ready to start the assessment proper, she was shown various images and short video clips that seemed primarily focused on relationships and couples and all things romance. They started with fairly tame images — couples walking together in the park, on the beach, in the mountains, and so on. Various couples doing things together, leading their lives together, spending time in various places.
After a while, she noticed that more and more of the clips seemed to involve little stories — very short, very simple, but making it clear that something was happening to the couple involved. It was almost like watching a string of TV commercials, each designed to provoke certain feelings inside her through only a minute or two of dramatic events and associated music.
As the assessment progressed, however, the images and clips also became more and more erotic in nature — and more and more explicit.
It got to the point that she was being shown out-and-out pornography. Each clip showing a little scenario, highlighting some kind of sexual fantasy, kink, or fetish. It was like flicking through random clips on Pornhub — a website she had become intimately familiar with recently.
A couple having sex in a car, risking discovery.
A woman dragging a delivery guy into her house for adulterous sex.
Two college girls stripping off for a threesome with a male friend.
A man watching a couple have sex on the bed in front of him.
At first, Carrie felt a little embarrassed, watching these clips in front of Sally, the technician. But Sally was good at reassuring her, encouraging her to relax and allow herself to respond to the ‘inputs’ naturally. She gave the impression that none of this was unusual. Everyone assessed by Marriage 2.0 was exposed to this kind of imagery.
Before the assessment was over, however, Carrie had found herself pushed over the edge into a full orgasm — despite the fact that nobody was touching any of her erogenous zones.
Sally had momentarily left the room when that happened. It was a bit of a relief, because Carrie felt so ashamed of herself. To actually come while a technician was right there beside her would have been just awful.
Sally was all smiles as they detangled her from the machine, removing all the electrodes and the various pieces of monitoring equipment.
‘You did very well,’ she said.
Carrie had smiled back, trying to stop herself from blushing furiously. ‘That was insane.’
‘It’s just the nature of the assessment, I’m afraid. We need to work out what gets you going. What your preferences are. What will satisfy you.’
Carrie laughed. ‘I feel pretty satisfied already.’
Sally had replied, with a knowing twinkle in her eye: ‘You just wait until your Experience begins.’
Two weeks later, she received a text from Marriage 2.0 congratulating her on the start of her “Experience.”
The message after that came in the form of a 22-digit number.
What the hell was that?
She Googled the number, which automatically brought up a tracking page for the US Postal Service. Marriage 2.0 were sending her a package?
She tracked it, waited for it, and then made sure she was home from work to receive it without Ben knowing it was coming.
She still felt guilty about visiting Marriage 2.0 without him. Guilty about the unexpectedly hefty price tag for saving their marriage. If Ben found out, would he be angry? But Ben was safely in his video game dungeon when Carrie brought in her hefty package.
To her surprise, the package turned out to be a brand-new PlayStation 5.
‘What the — ?!’
For a few moments, she just stared at it. What a disappointment. Was this the solution to their marriage problems? Ben, of course, already had a PlayStation 5. So was this supposed to be for her?
What were they suggesting — that she spend all her spare time playing video games, too, to distract from being a Game Widow?
They could have arranged a romantic tour of Paris or Venice for the price she’d paid for the service. They could have staged a full intervention in Bora Bora to force Ben to recognize and deal with his addiction.
Instead, they’d sent her a video games console.
It seemed so stupid.
Later, after Ben had emerged to grab his dinner and haul it back to his cave like a dragon accepting the sacrifice of a virgin from a nearby village, Carrie’s anger quelled a little.
She texted a wry message to Katie along the lines of, I told a marriage counseling service about Ben’s video game addiction, and they sent me my own fucking PlayStation5.
Half an hour later, Katie was on the doorstep, a bottle of Chardonnay in her hand, a full tut-tut on her lips.
‘Ben, you’re a fucking loser!’ Katie yelled down the stairs into Ben’s troll cave.
Ben yelled back, ‘Hi, Katie!’
Over some helpful and entirely cathartic white wine, Carrie and Katie unwrapped the new PlayStation and checked it out.
‘Ooo, there’s some of those VR headset things,’ Katie pointed out as Carrie plugged the thing into the TV.
‘This is the best kind of virtual reality,’ Carrie joked, holding up the wine bottle.
When they finally switched it all on, and the software updates were complete, there was one game available for them to play — ‘Elven Quest V.’ It was some kind of epic fantasy adventure where they could roam around a spectacular landscape and fight monsters for rewards. They could perform tasks to earn game currency and level up their characters to make it easier to fight monsters.
Carrie had already been given a character with which to start the game — a mysterious sorceress named Yesenia.
They had to make up a character for Katie to use — Princess Xanax, a fair maiden with unfair principles.
And, okay, it was pretty fun to play. The scenery was lovely. It felt good killing fire-breathing antelopes and goblin bus conductors to earn money to supe up their characters’ outfits or spell books.
More fun to play with wine.
You could meet other players playing through the magic of the Interweb. You could trade with them for things, you could entice them to part with food or other goods through a little girly sweet-talking. Men were so easy.
You could flirt with some of the guys whose characters were all ripped abs and square jaws, and who probably looked like Jabba the Hutt in real life.
Carrie and Katie almost forgot the entire reason why they were playing this game in the first place.
Then while they were sourcing fresh wine from the kitchen, Carrie noticed that she’d been sent a text message from Marriage 2.0 telling her to go kill a GorgoGoth and then find her way to the Lamb & Flag Tavern.
Ah, yes, hadn’t all this been about saving her marriage?
By that stage, they didn’t mind being set a quest. And perhaps, thanks to the alcohol, the fact it had been Marriage 2.0 who had sent them on the quest made it seem mildly exciting.
While Katie was asking one of their growing coterie of in-game admirers for suggestions on where their quest might begin, Carrie was back to pondering why Marriage 2.0 might want her to play this game in the first place.
‘So what the fried fuck is a GorgoGoth, dork?’
‘You’re not supposed to call them dorks, Katie.’
‘Jesus, when did my best friend become so woke?’
‘They’re nerds. Geeks if they have any class. Not dorks.’
‘Ben’s a big fucking dork.’
Did Marriage 2.0 want her to get into this video game so she had something to talk to Ben about? Something new to boost the bond between them? Did they think Ben would see her playing video games up here in the living room, and that he’d want to join her for the first time in ages?
‘It is pretty addictive, you have to agree,’ Katie said as they finally tracked down the fabled GorgoGoth, and dispatched it from this mortal world with a slice of poisoned baloney.
‘Do you think they want me to play this thing just so I understand his addiction?’
‘I don’t know — maybe you’re supposed to get addicted, too.’
Addictive it was: it hardly felt like they’d spent any time at all on it, and suddenly it was midnight, and Katie had to try to tear herself away from it all, so she could get some sleep before work the following day.
Then in the morning, as Carrie went to work, all she could think about was what they would find in the Lamb & Flag now that they had killed the GorgoGoth. She suspected it would have something to do with the Jewel of Deniathlon, which they had been awarded upon killing the monster.
As soon as she got home after work, she immediately hooked herself up to the damn PlayStation 5 again, so she could try to find her way to a tavern by the name of the Lamb & Flag.
Dear Lord. She was totally becoming Keanu Reeves from the fucking Matrix.
It was just so easy to get into. And then you had all the benefits of normal social interaction, except that you didn’t have to put on makeup, or pick out the exact right outfit, or venture out of your nice, warm, cozy little fleapit of a home to meet people and enjoy the little dopamine and oxytocin boosts that came from socializing.
You could sit on a sofa in your baggy sweats and stuff your face with greasy pizza while being a goddess of conversation — and flirtation — in the virtual world.
Was this what Ben spent all his time doing down there in his troll cave?
Christ. And even though her character, Yesenia, was hardly an accurate representation of herself, it felt good when one of these nerds started showering her with compliments and failed pickup lines and borderline inappropriate innuendo. And though she knew none of them would look anything like their steroidally enhanced avatars in real life, it was nice to get the attention.
She could stave off the loneliness, even if it all felt a little fake.
She could even flirt a little bit, if any of the guys she met turned out to have even half an ounce of charisma. It was pretty fun. It even made her feel a little warmth in certain places, something she hadn’t felt in a long while.
In fact, more and more, when she got home from work and felt a burning need to fire up the PS5, it was from a desire to flirt with guys and make them truly want her.
That wasn’t cheating, was it? Especially when it was only in a video game.
And sure, she didn’t need to tell anybody, least of all Ben, that she’d taken to playing the game upstairs in the privacy of the bedroom. Well, you didn’t even need to connect the PS5 to a TV if you were using the VR headset.
She didn’t need to tell anyone, including Katie, that sometimes flirting with guys in the game made her feel like quietly dipping a hand into her panties to take care of that warm tingle she was having down there.
She didn’t need to worry that at any particular moment, there were dozens of geeks dotted around this city who would drop everything in their lives just to come over here and satisfy her carnal needs.
She only needed to give the word.
Marriage 2.0 — Season Two continues with Carrie & Ben #2 >>
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