My husband and I have different opinions on competition. He has always been very competitive, in many areas of life. We used to play bridge together but I had to stop being his bridge partner for my mental health. He was serious about the weekly games and insisted that we study, practise and do postmortems on numerous games. To be honest, once we’d left the bridge club on any day, I couldn’t have cared less about if we’d won or lost.
I’ve asked friends about how they feel about winning and have been told, “Everybody wants to win,” and “Well, you definitely feel better if you win than if you lose,” but I don’t feel that way.
Am I abnormal for not caring about winning or losing games?
Eleanor says: I don’t think you’re abnormal, I think there’s a huge spectrum of attitudes to competition and recreational winning.
But I also don’t totally think that’s the question. What would it matter if you were the only one in the world who didn’t value competition like this? You still wouldn’t enjoy spending time with it. It’d still feel unpleasant. That’s the question you need to answer here – not whose preference is normal, but how to interact given the difference.
I think one key is not to moralise at each other. People have different emotional constitutions and they show up in what we count as fun. Some people like competition, just like some people love the managed induction of fear via horror movies or rollercoasters and other people can’t stand them, or how some people can only relax with unstructured time and other people feel as if they’re wasting precious recreation time without plans.
Where these splits get us into trouble is when we start treating people with the contrary preference with that sort of judgment-tinged bafflement.
To prevent that, it can help for each of you to think about what enjoyment the other gets from doing things their way. He thinks you should do postmortems of the game but does he see why you prefer to just get out and play? Can he see why it’s the experience and not the result that makes you happy?
And it goes both ways. You don’t like competition, but why does he? Lots of people like competition for the way it gets you really absorbed in learning a skill. When you’re trying to win, you bring effort and focus and creativity to a task with measurable improvements. Lots of people find that genuinely fun; it can be fun to see what your mind or your body are capable of.
It’s too easy to look at people on the other sides of these preference divides and explain them in pathologising ways, or think, “I don’t see what anyone could see in that.” Much better to be able to understand what others value about these ways of doing things even if we don’t value it ourselves.
Once you’ve done that and you can each see why the other might enjoy things their way, your joint task is a pretty straightforward one. It’s just, “How can we find stuff that feels fun for both of us?” That’s so much nicer to deal with than – when playing board games or picking the lunch or spending the holiday morning or whatever – getting suckered into moralistically thinking of the other: “How can you be like that?”
As long as it’s with a fond laugh that you say you can’t play bridge together, I think it’s fine and normal to have different styles. Some people get absorbed and captivated best when they’re aiming at success. Some people find that imposes pressure and destroys the fun. It’s totally normal to have different styles. But we need to be able to tell the difference between that kind of clash, and the ugly version where the game starts to stand in for the whole relationship.
