Relationships are the ultimate experiment in teamwork. Ideally, a loving relationship is a lifetime contract filled with championship seasons and jewelry that screams happiness. But even the best teams struggle to find harmony—think Shaq and Kobe, George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson, Steinbrenner and Billy Martin (who was hired and fired five times), Steinbrenner and Joe Torre. Now think about "us."

Every team—good or bad—gets an off-season, a few months to heal, reflect on wins and losses, make adjustments. For professional athletes that means stepping away from the arenas, toward big-game fishing, rounds of golf, high-priced hookers, and maybe a trial.

For those of us who slog through work, bills, and household chores together, it's the opposite: Sport is our refuge. It's a chance to get away from our co-captain and become one with our base, instinctual, competitive selves.

For centuries, sport was the all-male Utopia, a gridiron Garden of Eden, a hardwood haven. But today, the Sportress of Solitude is a co-ed locker room. Does this mean that sports should be shared within a loving relationship? Sure. Does it mean that sports should be played between parties in a loving relationship? Hell, no.

When the buzzer goes off, your place in the pecking order is revealed. Why create a dynamic of inferiority and superiority in a relationship, which already has so many blind corners and pitfalls?

"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 flame. 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, fit, 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.

Women expect us to be strong. Sure, flashes of breakdowns can be fairly benign once you're deep into a relationship. But show that crap too early, and your love game is over before it starts.