Are You Too Competitive With Your Guy?

by Dean Chandler

“But we play for fun. We don’t care who wins!” may be your 21st-century superego’s shell game. But listen carefully, and you’ll hear your primordial id snarling “Bullshit!”

For men, basement ping-pong is a blood sport designed to establish dominance. And so it should be. It’s competition. Introducing your lover into the equation contaminates the true essence of sport, and contaminates your relationship.

Say you’re playing tennis with your fuzzy-ball-holding ?ame. As a man, what do you do? Do you go for the jugular—hit booming forehands, smoking passing shots—or do you do the noble and, yes, noncompetitive thing, and just push the ball back over the net? You’re screwed either way. You shove it down her throat, you look like a dick. You tap it back, and not only are you a wuss, you might also lose. As Joshua says in the movie Wargames, “The only winning move is not to play.”

I speak from experience.

I dated a girl who was a track star in college. She was beautiful, smart, ?t, and fast. If it involved pickin’ ’em up and puttin’ ’em down, she’d crush me. I was all right with that, though, because that was her domain. I was never dumb enough to wonder who had the better 40 time. I knew that if she looked over her shoulder, she would have seen the alpha male becoming a beta.