Smashing your partner’s game console is not a solution

I wear makeup. If my fiancé went in the bathroom and snapped my eyeliner pencil, I’d be fuming. But here I am watching these YouTube videos of girls smashing their boyfriends' consoles out of anger. All for different reasons: They don’t get enough attention, that’s all he does with his free time…whatever.

A lot of women I know, especially ones in similar situations, wear makeup. I'm sure that these girls would be very angry if their boyfriends had busted their eyeshadow palettes or shredded their clothes. That’s an equivalent — not even just to men. If anyone harmed my systems, I’d break every one of their limbs and cut them with spoons. Yes, I said with spoons.

You wouldn’t want such destruction to come to what you consider valuable. What could be going on here?

The thought occurs to me that if you don’t like your significant other's behavior, why not just leave? You can’t change them, and smashing their belongings is just going to make them angry. And if you don’t expect them to replace their consoles, you’re nuts. So now not only does your beloved not trust you with their things, they're feeling angry, replacing what you smashed, and returning to the behavior that you didn’t like to begin with. Obviously,  this isn't a match made in heaven.

Smashing a $200 to $400 system doesn’t prove anything. It proves that you have a temper and that you can’t control it. That you’re childish. That you’re petty. It’s causing a problem in your relationship rather than working on the existing one that even caused you to consider such an extreme.

Some days, even being a gamer myself, I get frustrated when I want to go out and my fiancé wants to stay in and play. But a working relationship is a compromise of those times.

I want to run errands, but we’ll do half of them today and half tomorrow so that he has more game time before work. Done. He wants to go to the movies,  but I want to beat the final boss. We go to the movies the next day, then. Done.

Half of the time, your significant other isn't even aware that they’re playing as much as they are. If a game is really good, you tend to lose yourself in it. Sitting down next to your beloved and annoying them into a conversation about the issue is a much better solution than smashing the game console, and their irritation with you will be so much shorter-lived.

Now, I’m aware that some of these videos are fakes — staged to garner attention since smashing consoles seems to be a fad. That still doesn’t make it OK.

I’ve also seen a couple videos of parents smashing their children's consoles for refusing to go outside, not stopping playing…whatever the case may be. In what world do adults exist where they shouldn’t be able to think of a better punishment than smashing their childern's valued possessions?

Firstly, this teaches the kid this is OK behavior for their own offspring: "Well, when I was bad, my dad did it to me, so it’s OK." Secondly, this teaches the kid that the parent has no self-restraint.

How about these parents just wait 'til the child goes to school, hide the system, and offer an ultimatum to getting it back. That's significantly better than smashing the console, which, by the way, will probably wreck the hard drive and all the game saves. Now these parents are teaching their kids that all hard work can be destroyed, so why bother? It’s all psychology — all footprints in the child’s mind that will come into play somewhere later in that kid’s life.

Control your temper. You can find better solutions to "gaming problems" than destroying a valuable system.