So, it’s finally here. The day we have all been waiting for: regular season football has arrived! The Saints and the Packers will meet tonight in a clash of two Super Bowl contending teams. With all the buildup that has led us here – the lockout, the cancellation of the Hall of Fame game, the contract holdouts, the sloppy preseason play – we are still here, ready to glue ourselves to the TV for 3 hours of bone crunching hits, pom pom waving, and of course, plenty of wings to eat while you smile the returned glory to yourself of FOOTBALL!!!!! How will you be watching err… celebrating?

Yes, but with less wizardry.

Taking a cue from Lauren’s, “Top 5 things a girl should not say when watching baseball with her boyfriend,” let’s go over three rules of the season I urge ladies to respect during football season.

Rule #1 – Please, never under any circumstance, volunteer your man to do something on a Sunday during football season. It’s your grandmothers 80^th birthday brunch? Unless it’s at a sports bar, you’re out of luck. I have a wedding to go to on a SUNDAY, in OCTOBER … who does that? Luckily, I planned ahead, and while I will still have to dance the night away and drink the free drinks, I setup NFL Redzone on my phone and will be sure to find a side room I can duck into without being missed. I can not stress this enough ladies, you can have every single Sunday in a row outside of football season, but unless you booked a trip to the game, or a trip to your cousins’ who have a 65″ plasma TV, leave us be.

Rule #2 – When we are huddled over our laptops, desktops, iPads, and cell phones setting, changing, or flat out tinkering with our Fantasy Football lineup, please refrain from uttering anything along the lines of “Yeah, he’s just gonna sit in front of the stupid TV all day watching fake guys put up fake numbers on his iPad” to your girlfriend on the phone. You know what you signed on for when you started dating the guy, he loves his fantasy football and in the end, will respect what you love, no matter how much he wants to bury a million feet underground.

Rule #3 – If you’re wary of losing time with your man, make him some WINGS! If you waltz in the room with a tray full of buffalo’d goodness at1:02 PM right after kickoff, your man will give you anywhere from 4 to 16 minutes of extra interaction time. It will take him at least 2 minutes to thank you properly, and from there you can start the conversation by going all Food Network on him and explaining how you made them. That’s got to buy you at least 5 to 10 minutes more. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, well that’s even truer on Sundays from September through February when that “way” is paved with wings and blue cheese.

These are 3 simple rules any woman can follow, and believe me, if you do, you will get extra attention in the offseason. Especially if you remind your man of what you went through during the 6 long, hard months of football that stole your man away for one seventh of every week. And we haven’t even brought up Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, or Saturday playoff games, but hey, if you can make it through 17 Sundays, a few extra weekdays should be nothin’.