Why Couples Should Play Sports Together
What 15 Years of Competition Taught Me About Relationships, Intimacy, and Connection Under Pressure
Some of what I've learned about intimacy happened on a court.
Conventional relationship wisdom often tells couples to avoid the things that create unnecessary conflict.
For athletic couples, that can mean something surprisingly specific:
Don't play together.
Don't enter the tournament together. Don't partner in pickleball. Don't put yourselves in situations where mistakes, competition, frustration, and pressure might spill over into your relationship.
My husband, Bryan, and I heard some version of this advice for years.
We chose not to follow it.
We've played sports together for as long as we've loved each other. Our first date was a doubles volleyball tournament. We won and celebrated afterward with carrot cake.
Fifteen years later, some of the most important things I've learned about intimacy haven't happened in the bedroom.
They've happened on a court.
Because playing sports with your romantic partner has a way of revealing relationship patterns that can otherwise remain surprisingly difficult to see.
Why Playing Sports Together Can Create Relationship Conflict
For years, Bryan and I experienced many of the reasons couples decide they shouldn't play sports together.
Mistakes could become personal.
An imperfect set or a ball hit out of bounds could carry an undertone of disappointment or criticism. A simple error could become internalized as something much larger:
I'm disappointing you.
When points started slipping away, tension would build.
Pressure created the feeling that something needed to be done. In my attempt to make things better, I would start fixing, managing, explaining, or trying harder.
Play would disappear.
Seriousness would enter.
Sometimes one of us would work harder while the other collapsed. Sometimes we switched roles.
Competition could also stir up our individual relationships with excellence. Could we both shine at the same time? Could one person's great play exist without the other experiencing it as a commentary on their own?
And perhaps most difficult was emotional contagion.
One person's frustration could quickly become everyone's frustration. Judgment, blame, and tension traveled across the court and sometimes followed us all the way into the car.
The gear in the back.
The cold silence.
One person attempting to repair and somehow making things worse.
The music getting turned up to fill the space neither of us knew how to bridge.
For a while, all of this seemed to prove the conventional wisdom right.
Maybe couples really shouldn't play together.
The Court Wasn't the Problem
Except not playing together wouldn't have solved any of it.
Eventually, we began to notice something.
The court wasn't creating these relationship patterns.
It was revealing them.
The mistake wasn't thinking:
We shouldn't play together.
The mistake was assuming:
If we stop playing together, these dynamics disappear.
They don't.
The same patterns can follow us into conversations about money, parenting, vacations, creative collaboration, household responsibilities, and intimacy.
And yes, they can follow us into the bedroom.
The court simply makes them harder to hide.
Competition adds pressure. Decisions happen quickly. Mistakes are visible. Outcomes matter. Bodies become activated. There isn't always time to compose the perfect response.
And that's exactly why play can become such a powerful relational laboratory.
We didn't develop capacity so we could feel less. We developed it so we could hold more.
Play Can Become a Relationship Practice
Once I stopped seeing the court as the source of our problems, I began seeing another possibility.
If play can reveal our relationship patterns, perhaps it can also give us somewhere to practice them.
Sports provide something relationships desperately need:
repetition.
You get another serve.
Another point.
Another mistake.
Another moment of frustration.
Another opportunity to notice.
Another opportunity to respond differently.
The repetition is built into the game.
Instead of waiting for the next major relationship conflict to discover whether something has changed, the court gives us dozens of tiny moments in which to practice being together under pressure.
What Playing Together Has Taught Us
Over the years, the game beneath the game began to change.
Then: Mistakes became personal.
Now: A mistake can remain a mistake.
An error doesn't have to become evidence about our worth, our partner's respect for us, or the state of the relationship. Sometimes a ball landing out is simply a ball landing out.
That sounds simple.
Under pressure, it isn't.
Pressure Doesn't Have to Become Management
Then: Pressure turned play into management.
Now: We can care intensely without immediately fixing each other.
I still notice Bryan's state.
The difference is that I don't automatically make it my assignment.
The impulse is sometimes still there, but it has become more of a flicker than a command I habitually follow.
I can attune to my own state and practice staying openhearted under pressure.
I used to think being a good partner meant helping us get back to a better state.
Now I'm learning that sometimes the most loving thing I can do is let Bryan have his state without leaving mine.
There Can Be Room for Both People's Excellence
Then: Excellence could feel threatening.
Now: We're developing greater capacity to let excellence coexist.
Competition can expose places where comparison, insecurity, perfectionism, or the need for validation still live.
It can also give us somewhere to practice something different:
Your excellence doesn't require my diminishment. Mine doesn't require yours.
The relationship can become large enough to hold both.
Connection Doesn't Require Emotional Sameness
Then: One person's emotion could become everyone's emotion, and repair took forever.
Now: We can recover without requiring the other person to change state first.
After one particularly charged morning of pickleball, I noticed Bryan's internal tension.
In the past, I might have disconnected, matched his emotional temperature, personalized it, or tried to force connection.
This time, I understood something differently.
My internal state, and the state of our relationship, didn't have to be dependent on his.
I could hold two truths at once:
We're having a hard moment, and I trust our connection while we're having it.
Connection doesn't require emotional sameness.
Intensity Was Never the Real Problem
Then: We thought our intensity was the problem.
Now: Intensity is part of what makes playing together so damn good.
At one point, we tried becoming less intense.
We became so cautious about triggering each other that we overcorrected. We communicated less. Played cautiously. Tried not to care quite so much.
We became flat.
Our play suffered. So did our enjoyment.
It turns out I never wanted less intensity.
Intensity is part of what makes competition exhilarating. It's also part of what makes a deeply connected relationship feel alive.
The work wasn't learning to care less.
It was developing greater capacity for how much we cared.
What Greater Relationship Capacity Makes Possible
We still want to win.
Sometimes desperately.
We still get frustrated. We still care enough for the game to get under our skin.
But caring deeply no longer has to cost us our access to play.
The greatest change isn't simply that we fight less on the court.
It's that there's more of us available when we play.
More laughter.
More risk.
More intensity.
More generosity.
More pleasure.
We didn't develop capacity so we could feel less. We developed it so we could hold more.
And somewhere along the way, I realized none of this stayed on the court.
Attunement. Responsiveness. Risk. Trust. Embodiment. Surrender. Letting another person affect you. Not controlling every outcome.
These are capacities that matter in sport.
They're also capacities that matter in intimacy.
Fifteen years later, I don't think it's a coincidence that some of our best play and our deepest intimacy ask many of the same things of us.
To read and respond to each other in the present moment.
To allow what the moment brings, even when it isn't what we planned.
To take risks without knowing exactly what will happen.
To be willing to get it wrong.
To surrender some control over where the experience is going.
What we're actually practicing together is:
our capacity to be fully alive together.
A deeply connected relationship isn't necessarily one in which two people have successfully removed everything that activates them.
Maybe it's one that has become capable of holding more life.
On that volleyball court on our first date, we were just two people who had no idea what the next 15 years would ask of us.
We played.
We won.
We ate carrot cake.
We thought we were playing a volleyball tournament.
We had no idea how much we'd actually be practicing.
This Field Note is adapted from an original essay published in Presence Under Pressure, where I write about relationships, emotional capacity, intimacy, and what becomes possible when we learn to stay present under pressure.→ Read the original essay on Substack→ New to my work? Start reading here:→ Get the original essays delivered to your inbox every week by subscribing for free. 