Every year, for the past six years, I face the same conundrum in the run-up to New Year’s Eve: Spend this festive holiday without my husband or spend it with him at a five-hour Phish concert. In the interest of kissing him at midnight, I usually choose option B. Instead of watching the ball drop with loved ones, I have gazed up, in awe and confusion, as the members of Phish (a quartet of grown men) ride in on a giant hot dog high above the noodling masses of New York’s Madison Square Garden. While singing a song named “Meatstick.” Partially in Japanese.

My name is Michelle, and my husband is a Phish fan.

Phish-wifery is a plight that can make even golf widowhood seem cushy. My husband’s Phish fandom is a calendar-consuming siege that hijacks most major holidays: There’s New Year’s at MSG (though, in a rare gift, last year Phish took us to Miami); Halloween in Las Vegas—I stayed back, but he couldn’t bear to miss it, even though it was our daughter’s first Halloween, and she was going as a strawberry; and July Fourth in Chicago, where Phish’s shaggy frontman, Trey Anastasio, was replacing Jerry Garcia in the Grateful Dead reunion shows. In years past, he has decamped to “Hampton,” “SPAC,” and other venues beloved by Phish-heads but located in regional cities that, significantly, when I’m deciding whether or not to join, do not have reputable spas. Flights, hotels, tickets, and signed concert posters are not inexpensive. “I wish he’d set a Phish budget,” one sister in Phish marriage, whose husband attends approximately 15 shows a year, told me. Spoiler: He doesn’t.

As Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele brilliantly put it in one of their farewell sketches, “When dudes get into Phish, they don’t come back.” My husband (who asked that I not name him) doesn’t just go to one Phish concert when the tour comes to town; he goes to all four, because each night’s set, each 13-minute jam, is its own special snowflake. “Will’s still determined to hear that one song that he hasn’t heard yet,” my friend and fellow Phish WAG, Katie, told me of her Phish-obsessed boyfriend. When my husband doesn’t burn airline miles to fly to the shows, he “couch tours”—live-streams—them, raising a glass of Sauv Blanc to profound Phish lyrics like “Whatever you do, take care of your shoes.”

The show doesn’t end with the show, either: The next morning, my husband spoons not with me, but with his phone, refreshing Mr. Miner, the preeminent Phish blogger and set-list analyzer. “They did ‘Weaselface,’ ‘Bubble Trouble,’ straight into ‘Spongehead,’” Key and Peele mocked of the morning-after set-list reflection ritual. Those are faux Phish songs, but they’re not far off. I know “Fluffhead” is a real Phish jam. And “‘Fee’ is a song about a weasel,” my husband said.