Why You Shouldn’t Compete With Your Partner

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power couple advice

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A little healthy competition can be a good thing, but not in your relationship. That is something I worry about with all of these self-proclaimed power couples. Power couples certainly do exist, but I think the true power couple is identified by outsiders. If you call yourself a power couple, then that immediately indicates that being powerful and being perceived as highly successful or well known as a couple is important to you. But that shouldn’t really be a factor in who you choose as a romantic partner. Your romantic relationship should be pure, innocent, and free of any concerns of outsider opinion. But we all know those couples who fancy themselves another version of Kim and Kanye. And once status and notoriety are so important, then there is this element of competition within the relationship. Each person feels pressure to contribute to this pseudo celebrity status. Maybe your partner does push you to be successful in your career, but is that the person who should push you? Is that the person who should intimidate you? Won’t the rest of the world push you enough, and your relationship should be a safe space? Here are reasons you should never compete with your partner.

You need to discuss your failures

The best way to learn from our failures is to talk about them. We need to hash them out, analyze what happened, and see what we can do differently next time. But you won’t feel comfortable analyzing your mistakes with your partner if you are competitive with him. You don’t even want him to know that you make mistakes.

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So you pretend your mistakes didn’t happen

Let’s be honest, your friends or your mother will only talk to you for so long about your career. Typically, a romantic partner is the only person outside of our career who is willing to talk to us in depth about our career. So if you want talk to your partner about your mistakes, you probably just won’t talk about them. Then you are bound to repeat them.

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You need somewhere to let it all out

And there is the emotional factor of being let down in your career. When you get looked over for an opportunity or you get rejected from something you want, it is obviously emotionally difficult. But you feel competitive with your partner, so you don’t want to show weakness. You want him to think that everything is fine, and that you are still winning the race. You can’t discuss how you’ll bounce back.

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When you hide some emotions, you hide all them

Since you won’t open up to your partner about career related emotions, you might get in the habit of just not opening up to him. It is hard to compartmentalize, and say I will talk to my partner about emotions related to my family or my friends but not about my career. You’ll probably generally close up around him.

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You won’t discuss ideas

If you and your partner have this delusion of being a power couple, then there is a lot of pressure on you when you are just trying to figure out your next move. You know that your partner feels that your career affects his career. You don’t feel that you can have an open safe space to discuss ideas. You don’t feel that your partner gives you advice based on what will make you happy but rather what he thinks boosts your status as a power couple.

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So the career always comes first

In general, when making decisions as a couple, the priority is your careers. Anything from who you befriend to where you live, you decide based on your careers first, and your health as a couple second. This is a recipe for a broken relationship. If you two don’t put the relationship first, nobody else will.

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Conversations are manicured

You get very used to wanting to present this successful and strong persona to your partner. So you calculate your words. You plan what you will say in conversations.

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All conversations go stiff

Once you get in the habit of using lots of filters and editing yourself to talk to your partner about your career, it will just become the way you talk to him about everything. And that is a damn shame, because your romantic partner should be the one person you can talk to without any filters.

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You will always choose the work event

If a career opportunity comes up that would interrupt a personal obligation, like going to your partner’s friend’s wedding, or going on a weekend getaway with your partner, you will choose the career event. You have already established an every man for himself mentality, and encourage the idea that you are both free to choose your career over each other. In fact, you fear the other one would do the same, so it’s what you do to get ahead of him.

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You can’t really celebrate together

When your partner has a great success, it is a bittersweet feeling. Rather than just being happy for him, you feel like you are falling behind within this power couple. You are just trying to figure out what you can do next to get a leg up.

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His downfalls make you happy

This will be the most disgusting moment of all. When your partner doesn’t get what he wants in his career, there will be this tinge of joy inside of you. It’s gross. But you cultivated it, by being competitive with him. So, naturally, when he has a career setback, you have trained your brain to be happy, because you are technically winning.

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You have other people who can push you

Between siblings, friends, idols, and coworkers, don’t you have a lot of other people who can provide you a little healthy competition? Why should that be a romantic partner?

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Do you use this to avoid emotional intimacy?

I have often found that couples who are competitive in their careers with each other, actually just have emotional intimacy issues. Treating the relationship as some sort of career advancing device is just another way of keeping themselves from having a real connection to someone. They are not comfortable being vulnerable, and competing with their partner allows them to not be vulnerable.

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You will lie to each other

If things aren’t going as planned in your career, you may wind up lying to each other. You could get into debt and not tell the other person about it. You could have a lot of problems about which you aren’t telling the other person. Of course, if you get married, this will affect his financial situation one day.

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This should be your cocoon

Ultimately, your relationship should be the one place you are allowed to look weak. It is the one place you are allowed to admit insecurities. You should be able to confess when you fear you don’t have what it takes. You should also celebrate your victories in those moments you feel strong. If you treat your relationship as a competitive career arena, you cheat yourself out of the one relationship in life that could be void of that superficial element.

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