“Dear BRK, how much time do you devote to your WoW habit and how does your wonderful Mrs. BRK handle/cope/punish you accordingly? I have noticed a big difference in playing time between those who have been married longer than us newlyweds if the Mrs. is not a gamer. I’m not about to jeopardize my good standing with Mrs. Gitr by starting to raid Kara, so how do you raid and still get all the benefits of marriage? Gitr.”

If you’re not aware, Gitr is the altaholic who runs Gitr Knows WoW. A WoW blogger of supreme longevity, he also has approximately 14,302 alts and is the founder of the Buttered Monkeys guild. Truly a man to be appreciated.

We get to play about 15-20 hours per week depending on the raiding schedule. We only play after 7:30pm. We don’t play past 11:00pm. We don’t play during the day on the weekends. We save Saturday night as a date-night.

Now then, as for how we escape the evil clutches of Mrs BRK several nights per week, there are several tricks and evasions we employ:

We provide Alternative Entertainment Sources. DVR/TIVO, Netflix, iPhone, MacBook, and HDTV are big-time keys to being left alone. Did you know every episode of Sex in the City is on DVD? Don’t you think she wants to watch them? Get them on your Netflix queue. Subscribe to HBO and let her watch all those bad 80s movies over and over again. Sometime your spouse will get hooked on a really good movie, like Mrs BRK and The Godfather trilogy, in which case you buy it and let them run it with headphones on all the time. Unfortunately, this can backfire and they might latch on to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. We can’t emphasize the headphones enough.

Definitely leave small but meaningful messes around the house. Nothing that will require scrubbing or vacuums, but maybe a single dish containing some half-munched salsa on the coffee table in the family room. It’s too small to call us in to clean up, but no wife is gonna just leave it there. And once the salsa dish is emptied, washed, and placed in the dishwasher, there’s always something in the kitchen that needs cleaning and you’ve just primed her Chores-Motor. That’s a good 30-minutes to two hours of solitude for you right there.

Do the laundry, never fold it. No wife on the planet will leave laundry in the dryer overnight. “It’ll wrinkle and I’ll have to do it all over again!” they’ll screech. Do they know that we don’t care if our NASA tee shirt is wrinkled? We wear it to clean the pool and do yard work; we just don’t want it funky when we put it on. Not folding laundry, especially if you can get your spouse to fold toddler’s clothes, will free you for days.

After 7pm telephone calls. You’ve got those free minutes, use them. Call your wife’s best friend at 7:05pm, say “Hi, how are ya?” and then hand the phone over. Your night is set.

Get her a hobby like Genealogy. Easily to do and research at the beginning, much harder and time-involving once the first three or four generations are complete. Get genealogy software that allows her to import pictures and create family trees. Point her to the geneaology databases available on the Internet. If you can hook her on this, you’ve got months of time to yourself.

Treats. Buy her treats, small quantities, of course. Dark chocolate covered raisins or those cinnamon pita chips. Something that she loves and won’t want to share. Be a good husband and get her some. Let her sneak off with them and let her be “selfish” and not share. As soon as the cleaning in the kitchen is done and you hear that bag rustle, fire up your Kara run.

Cosmo. Get her a subscription. Don’t ever judge the contents though. Don’t make statements like, “All that magazine does is try to teach women to be comfortable with their bodies, that they don’t have to be size double-zero to be happy. Then they slam 700 pages of ads with nothing but mega-thin models in them. Isn’t that one of the worst double-standards ever perpetrated upon your gender, yet you continue to support them by buying that junk every Saturday at the store?”

No; wrong tact. Buy it for her. It goes great with dark chocolate covered raisins.

So you’ve got all this going and you still don’t have enough time to farm money for your epic flying skill? OK, work out a schedule. And if necessary, a contract:

I, the WoW-addict spouse, do hereby declare every Saturday and Wednesday night to be Date Night. I don’t raid. I don’t farm, I don’t quest, I don’t even log on the game. I’m in a marriage and WoW is not my life.

I, the WoW-addict spouse’s spouse, do hereby declare that every Tuesday and Friday night are WoW Raiding Nights. I won’t bother, I won’t nag, I won’t ask for help getting things down from high shelves in the pantry. From 7pm until midnight, I’m basically single and will accept my status with grace and chocolate.

And that’s basically how we at the BRK manse get by.