This is a love story about television. My love story about television.

I cut the cable cord a long time ago. The cost was too high and the majority of channels offered were, well, mediocre at best. I got by for years on my new favorite format: TV on DVD. I bought box sets and spent hours soaking up the plotlines from Six Feet Under and the West Wing. I became a series binger — that is, I would complete what took those poor regular cable subscribers years in the course of a few weeks (OK, sometimes it was a few days).

I was feeling pretty proud of myself.

Then streaming television started. I was an early Hulu adopter and remember having conversations about how “cool” it was that the ads on Hulu were all for NGOs and nonprofits. And those ads were few and far between. I watched The Office and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and yeah, I had to wait a week for the new episodes, but it was worth it.

Then the occasional car commercial started popping up. And what was once a single commercial ultimately turned into multiple ads per episode. It was starting to feel like television again. The magic of “free TV” was gone: I was now paying for these programs with my attention, which advertisers were paying Hulu for.

Then we got an Xbox and I no longer had to watch TV on my computer. I got really good at gaming … if gaming included “playing” Netflix.

Netflix was great for getting heavy doses of old television, but after a while I had seen all I needed to see of Twin Peaks and Cheers. I wanted to see the new shows again. What was Leslie Knope up to? Who was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live? Weren’t there housewives doing something in some city that I should care about? (Alright, I never got into those shows. I watched Gossip Girl instead).

Enter Hulu Plus. This was amazing! Sure, this meant that I now had to pay for Hulu with a monthly subscription to use it on the Xbox and yeah, it was pretty weird that some shows would say “Web Only” when I’d look them up on this device, but it was nice to watch Hulu on my television screen instead of a laptop. And while I heard plenty of people balk at the idea of paying a modest fee for television they once watched for free, I thought it wasn’t that bad and hey, maybe this would equate to more money for digital-distribution royalties for the content creators (yeah, right). I was happy to kick an additional $7.99 a month toward it, but there was something interesting happening here.

Now I was paying for Hulu twice: once with my monthly subscription rate and once when I had to sit through that annoying brie commercial (who bursts into group laughter over cheese?). But I was willing to compromise with Hulu here. I liked being able to watch all these shows and Hulu was doing a good job working on deals with content companies that made things I actually wanted to watch. And the shows were a lot quicker to get online. I made a ritual out of catching up on the Thursday night NBC lineup on Saturday mornings.

We’d reached a happy medium. But then everything changed. Fast forward to this week, when a colleague told me that Hulu was moving toward a system in which only cable subscribers will be able to access it. I couldn’t believe it. Hulu had completely revamped the way we watch shows … and now it wants to scramble backwards toward the cable TV model.

But Hulu, I am already paying for you twice. I am not going to pay for you three times. You seemed like a great thing when we met, but you’ve changed. If you go through with this “authentication” system, I’m out. Three strikes. We’re done.

So think it over, because I’m not the only one out there who is in this relationship with you. Technically speaking, you are still only two strikes down. So get it together, Hulu. And we can at least stay friends.