Welcome to This Changed My Life, an ode to the small, seemingly chill purchases bought by Autostraddle writers and editors this year that made our lives infinitely better. Did these items LITERALLY CHANGE OUR LIFE? No, we’re being gay and dramatic. But perhaps a pair of sunglasses really did change your life — who are we to judge?

You wanna hear something weird? My wife and I have been together in our home for the past two-and-a-half years, hardly seeing any other human beings because I’m immunocompromised, and we’re still not tired of each other. In fact, we’re somehow even more in love than we were when this pandemic started. We enjoy each other’s company even more than we did before Covid existed. We have a whole entire house; yet, we continue to migrate to the same rooms at the same time, in perpetuity. Mostly that room is our big downstairs open area, which consists of a living room space with a giant TV and all our gaming consoles, and a dining area that we’ve converted into a co-working space. We practically spend all our daylight hours here.

The only struggle we’ve really endured is that we don’t actually watch much of the same things on TV, and our schedules are pretty different so oftentimes when one of us is working, the other of us wants to relax and watch our stories or play our video games. See, I like cartoons and comedies and sci-fi and fantasy and gaudy women-fronted primetime soaps, whereas my wife prefers broody prestige dramas about — what IS Succession about anyway? Intergenerational wealth and bratty adult children? I like my bratty adult children stomping on and off well-lit stages and engaging in secret affairs with the Mommis who put the L in LGBTQ. Also, while my wife watches all my women’s sports with me, I don’t really watch sports played by men like she does — and sometimes those sports are on at the exact same time.

This summer, my life changed forever when I bought a bluetooth transmitter for our teevee! It’s called the 1Mii B06TX Bluetooth 5.2 Transmitter and it was less than $40. That sounds techy, but really it’s just this little box you connect to your TV. Then! You turn on your bluetooth headphones — and, lo! The TV sound goes directly into your earholes and not out of the TV’s soundbar! That means I can watch Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy fall in love over and over, or Luz and Amity fall in love over and over, or Grace and Frankie fall in love over and over — while my wife does her Clio Award-winning film editing just a few feet away. Or, you know, works on her Killing Eve fan fiction. Either way, important work the people demand! The bluetooth transmitter also means one of us can watch our sport on the TV with commentary, while the other one of us watches our sport on our iPad with commentary, and we can sit right beside each other, and hold hands, or lay our heads in each other’s laps. And I never even have to hear a single man’s voice!

Changed My Life: The 1Mii B06TX Bluetooth 5.2 Transmitter ($40)

The bluetooth transmitter is smaller than a tarot deck, super easy to set up, and helpfully blinks when it’s not connected to headphones and lights up blue when it is connected to headphones. It comes with several different cords you can use to connect it to the TV, depending on what kind of TV you have — or, in our case, which ports aren’t plugged into Nintendos and PlayStations. Also the little antennas are both cute (it looks like a Pokemon tbh) and sturdy. If you have cats who like to walk around on your TV stand and bat at everything that blinks, you don’t even have to worry about it. The antennae bend but don’t break. I have experienced no speech to video delays, no audio interference, and it works equally well across cable, TV apps, and gaming consoles.

The product description boldly claimed that it would DOUBLE MY HAPPINESS. I’m actually already pretty happy, so I can’t say it made me TWICE as happy, but it did make me 100% less likely to hear a man’s disembodied voice in my home, which is as close to magic as you can get in this human realm.

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