I recently started seeing someone who watches ALOT of TV... and I've noticed my reading drop by a ton! I used to read several books a week and I haven't finished one in the last month. TV seems to have this ability to suck you in and not let you go... I look up and it's time to go to bed. Worse yet, I can't read while it's on anymore. I miss the times when I was the TV watcher (and watched about 3 hours a week).

I hate to see readers stop reading. Last summer when I first moved to the city, I stopped reading. The longer I was away from books, the more I needed them. I needed the alone time with my thoughts and imagination.

Are you willing to try doing both? It sounds like your new man is into TV, which means you'll probably continue to be sucked in, but you can't just stop reading. Ahhhhh! The horror.

I went for about four years without television. It was interesting. I was reading books, magazines, and listening to CDs. I missed the Gulf War on TV, which seems to have been a formative moment for a lot of people.

I have a television now, though I rarely watch it. But it doesn't matter, because I waste hours at a time on the internet.

Well like you said, it's about turning the TV off. I'm not one of these "anti-TV" folk - I think, like almost every other medium, there's a fair amount of good things on TV and a ton of crap - but my wife and I don't watch a TON of TV. I'd say we probably average 8-12 hours a week of TV watching; I know some people average that in just two days (!) I don't just turn on the TV and flip around channel-surfing for hours. I tend to turn it on to watch a specific program or check news/weather and turn it off. I think way too often with TV the tendency is to turn it on and lay back and let it "serve" you - I know tons of people that do that, just zone out for hours at a time. I cannot do that, myself, inevitably I'll flip off the TV if nothing's appealing and just go back to reading; so, long answer to short question, I spend at least much time reading (an hour or two a day usually) as TV watching, in the long run, and that's how I get through 2-3 books in a typical week. Whew!