Romantic Love Is Not a Competitive Sport

Romantic Love Is Not a Competitive Sport names the comparison trap at the center of Sugar’s advice to a twenty-five-year-old woman who is happy in a new relationship but unsettled when her boyfriend mentions past partners. Sugar argues that attraction is not awarded by ranking people against one another: the reader is not competing with the women who came before her, and her boyfriend’s present choice matters more than their imagined advantages.

The Problem of Comparison

The letter writer describes a relationship only a couple of months old with a man she finds smart, good-natured, funny, and sexually appealing. Their sex life is good, but his occasional references to past experiences make her jealous and insecure. She does not think he means to upset her; she believes he trusts her and talks about his past without realizing its effect. Her fear is that she may not be enough for him.

Sugar answers directly that the insecurity is something the letter writer can address because she cannot change other people, only herself. She asks her to examine the assumption that knowledge of her boyfriend’s past threatens the present relationship. If she were not satisfying him, Sugar reasons, he would not be choosing to stay with her; his being with her is evidence that he likes her. His former partners are not rivals whose qualities determine her value.

Love Outside the Contest

The title rejects the competitive logic Sugar associates with romantic ideals promoted by television dating franchises and Hollywood. The letter writer is not being judged against a scorecard of bodies, intelligence, humor, generosity, or personal flaws. Some former partners may have qualities she does not, Sugar acknowledges, but those differences have no bearing on whether her boyfriend is drawn to her. Attraction is not a prize awarded to the highest-ranked person; the reader is running her own race.

Sugar does not pretend that this reasoning immediately abolishes jealousy. She recognizes that imagining a partner with people from his past can produce an uncomfortable feeling, while insisting that the feeling need not become a verdict about the reader’s adequacy or a reason to damage a relationship she values. The advice shifts the focus from comparison with absent women to the actual connection between the two people dating now.

Sugar’s Example

To make the advice personal, Sugar recalls finding an envelope addressed to Mr. Sugar in the basement. It held thousands of small glossy pieces that formed a photograph of a woman who had been with him before her. The photograph had not been torn up to erase the past; it was a puzzle made for him, accompanied by a card inviting him to return. Sugar describes the woman as a striking modern dancer and compares herself unfavorably with her.

The episode gives the advice its acknowledged difficulty: Sugar has experienced the same impulse to measure herself against a partner’s former lover. Her point is not that the pang never occurs, but that comparison cannot settle what the present relationship means. By placing her own insecurity beside the letter writer’s, she makes the title less a claim that jealousy is foolish than a direction for what to do with it: refuse to turn love into a contest whose outcome is decided by the imagined superiority of someone from the past.