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AJC.com > Living > Blog > Archives > 2007 > January > 12
Friday, January 12, 2007
Let the games begin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I know many of you out there are big sports fans. (And may I take this opportunity for a shameless mention of the No. 1 men’s basketball team in the country, my very own Tar Heels?)
Well, what happens when the competitive games enter into your relationship setting?
I had a longstanding rivalry with one of my exes over… well, just about everything. I’d score points for having a better undergraduate GPA than he did. He’d come back and remind me that he’d done better on his SATs. I’d sweetly point out his bad grammar, and he wouldn’t let me off the hook easily when I was unable to accurately calculate a 15 percent tip. And forget it when our schools played in basketball; the trash-talking was legion. It was all in good fun, really, and allowed us to keep a nice parity. The only problem, for me, was that I never could beat him in Scrabble.
It seems to me that most people like to feel a competitive edge over their partners in at least some arena. Hey, a little friendly rivalry keeps the relationship fresh, right?
But when it becomes a problem is when someone becomes a “sore loser.” My high school boyfriend always needed to prove to me that he was smarter than me and, to that end, never could stop reminding me that he went to a “better” university than I did (a debatable point if you ask me, but I digress.) At that point, the competition stopped being fun and turned into mean-spirited.
Do you have any competitions with your significant other? What are they? How do you think they matter to your relationship?
Do you ever feel like your partner’s competitive nature is a problem?
Can anyone ever “win” in a relationship competition?
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