Family feud: How couples with split football loyalties keep the peace
Kevin and Katie Darling of Arlington Heights didn’t watch the two recent Bears-Packers games together, and they won’t be watching together Saturday night either.
“She’s going to go out with her friends, and I’m going to go out with mine, and we will convene after the game is over,” Kevin said.
They agree it’s probably best not to be under the same roof for the playoff rivalry game.
“I am extremely intense,” he admits. “Packers losing bothers me for a couple days.”
The Darlings are among a subset of fans in these parts who live in a house divided anytime the teams from Chicago and Green Bay renew the NFL’s oldest rivalry.
It hasn’t been much of a rivalry, until recently. The Packers bested the Bears the last time they met in the playoffs for the NFC Championship game in 2011, and they lead the all-time series 109—97—6.
But both of the regular season matchups last month went down to the wire, and the Bears completed an improbable comeback in the last one. The Bears went on to clinch the NFC North division the following weekend, thanks in part to a Packers loss.
Katie Darling, 32, who works at a school in Northbrook, is from a family of seven kids — including five brothers — from Glenview.
“We’re a very sports-oriented family. I was born and raised into a Bears family,” she said.
Kevin Darling, the son of a Packers fan from Milwaukee, grew up in Arlington Heights. He says he didn’t “talk a lot of smack” to his many friends who back the Bears.
“I know when you win, don’t rub it in. You won. Just stay quiet. Bears fans are going to be mad,” said the 34-year-old logistics professional. “But then when we lost, yeah, I was so mad, and Katie knew better. She doesn’t rub it in either.”
She did agree to his plan to get married on Dec. 4, 2021 (12/4, of course, being the numbers of former Green Bay quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre).
Their daughter’s first birthday party was held at Gatsby’s Pizza & Pub during a Bears-Packers game.
“I told Katie, she can name the kids, she can say where they go to school, she can say what sports or activities they’re going to do, but I need my children to be Packer fans,” Kevin said.
Needless to say, 3-year-old Maggie now tries to pronounce, “Go Green Bean Packers.”
Other parents are a bit more diplomatic.
Rachelle and Joel Sikes of Cary are parents of children ages 1 and 3.
“We’ll let the kids choose what they want to do, who they want to root for,” says Rachelle, 36, a teacher who grew up a Packers fan just south of the state line in Richmond. “We can’t be upset if both the kids want to be Packers fans, or both the kids want to be Bears fans, and I’m the odd man out, or he’s the odd man out.”
They, too, don’t watch Bears-Packers games together. Even when they are watching their own team play another opponent, they try to keep things civil.
“There’s the occasional cutting remark once in a while,” acknowledges Joel, 37, who works in public relations and grew up a Bears fan in Lake Zurich.
Justin Lynch, whose family has had Bears season tickets since 1948 at Wrigley Field, says the football rivalry with his wife and her family is “all good-natured teasing and ribbing.”
The 37-year-old transportation carrier manager from Carol Stream met his wife Lindsey on a dating app at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 while both were at family and friends’ respective cabins in central Wisconsin.
Soon after they matched, Lindsey, 36, an accountant originally from Mukwonago, Wisconsin, remembers a friend’s reaction: “Oh my God, you cannot bring a Bears fan into this mix. Like, it’s just never going to work. Why would you do this to us?”
Their football allegiances came up right away when they started talking.
But they realized they had much more in common, and Lindsey moved to Carol Stream later that winter.
They sported their respective teams’ gear for their first Christmas card photo sent to family and friends on both sides of the cheddar curtain.
What did Lindsey’s family think about her moving to Illinois and marrying a Bears fan?
“Had it been for any other person than Justin, they would have not been happy,” she said. “They’re OK with it, just because of who he is, but they definitely give both of us a lot of grief.”
Justin will be sitting in the south end zone with his cousin during the game Saturday. Lindsey will be watching at home.
“It’s better for everyone, actually,” she says, “because no matter who wins or loses, we’ll each have our individual time to process and be happy for the other person by the time we’re reunited.”