One of my favorite pastimes when visiting my in-laws in Ohio is to borrow one of the family cars and head to the local cinema to catch a matinée show; it’s how I catch up on the big-screen action I miss out on here in the Big Apple. The tickets are cheaper; the audiences are quieter; and there are enthusiastic babysitters to be called upon. Thanks to these various facilitations, a couple of winters ago, I was able to view Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in its appropriate environment (i.e., not at home on a much smaller screen.)
I returned home just a tad deflated. Interstellar had been a dud: overly portentous, tedious at times, and much too enamored of its special effects. That was bad enough, but I had also noticed something peculiar about my viewing experience. A crucial component of my regular movie-watching at home had not been present: my regular partner in those adventures, my wife. I realized that built into my watching of a movie at home was her presence: when watching a scene on the screen, part of my reaction to it was caught up inextricably in a conscious and subconscious sensing of hers, whether horror, amusement, incredulity, and of course, sometimes, tears. (Sometimes my wife’s reactions are audible ones; sometimes, even as my eyes are exclusively trained on the screen, I find my thoughts turn to speculation about how she is responding to the same scene.)
That afternoon, as I had watched Interstellar alone, I found that my affective response to its offerings was curiously denuded; I felt as if they were lacking that part which was a sympathetic interaction with what would have been my wife’s responses to the movie. Somehow, over the years that my wife and I had been watching movies together, my responses to the movie-watching experience had started to include an interplay with hers. To watch a movie without my wife present was now to experience a peculiar sort of incompleteness in it. (There is also the small matter of how, once the movie was over, I was not able to engage in any kind of discussion with her about our respective takes on it.)
Such ‘boundary melting’ can be, depending on your perspective, frightening or exhilarating. Therapists ask us to be cognizant of the limits of our selves, to not let ourselves become subsumed in those of others; we worry incessantly about our ‘personal spaces;’ and of course, many couples are asked to ‘de-couple’ by counselors in an effort to get their personal relationships back on track. And yet, as the glories of truly rewarding sexual encounters remind us, the dissolution of our selves’ boundaries can be one of those rare moments during which non-mystics can have a quasi-religious experience.
A crucial aspect of the movie-watching experience at home was communication of a very particular kind, one that enriched my bare interaction with the director’s offering. That should be unsurprising, given that what we call our self arises precisely from a kind of inner communication within us.
Samir Chopra 
My wife and I watch sports together and I notice she is more involved than I. As for ‘decoupling’ there is none. For the past twenty-five years, we drive to work together, we work in the same lab (most of the time only us), do exercise (occasionally) together. At home, we cook together. We do just fine.