Chemical-rollercoasters: football, and toxic relationships

It strikes me that watching football has similarities with being in an emotionally abusive relationship, or a co-dependent one with some unhealthy addictive qualities.

            I’m thinking of the extreme ups and downs of watching a sport in which one second you’re ecstatic, and another you’re devastated, and in-between you’re either waiting in trepidation for the next thing to happen, or languishing in calm when a goal redeems the mood.

            The cycle of an unhealthy relationship goes something like this (and imagine it in a circle): tension building > incident > reconciliation > calm > tension building, etc.

            Let me say this; I am thinking of football (called soccer), not footy (called Aussie rules), because the low scores mean that it’s a feast of all-or-nothing. I played footy a lot (Aussie rules; four premierships), and I love it, and miss it. I have always played and loved sport.

Aussie rules has a bunch of toxic elements, certainly. But those are another topic, and I was thinking about the similarities I’m describing while I was watching Welcome to Wrexham, the Disney series produced by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny after they bought a low-tier Welsh football team.

It’s a great series, and I’d recommended it (if it weren’t on Disney).

Playing football, however, is not the same as watching football.

Things started percolating when the filmmakers highlighted how important football is to generations of men in their relationships with each other. Relating is obviously good. But the how is also significant; if football is an introduction to the insecure dopamine fixes you get from having a relationship with something you love (your team), and there’s a bunch of violence and extreme behaviour associated with football, then it’s having an impact on how people – in this case, men – experience emotions.

This reminds me of a few things, but one of them is knowing survivors of the bad relationship cycles who got quite used to the extreme ups and downs of that cycle, and its addictive nature, and learn to expect more of it in future relationships. I, myself, am too used to the ups and downs of an extreme relationship cycle, so it feels normal. And therefore, I’m more likely to stick with it.

I’m not demonising football. I love football. And there are a lot of things to unpack about the presumption that women don’t like football ‘naturally.’ But I’m interested in theses associations, and their relationship to the ability of men to tolerate high levels of emotional extremes in something that is heavily associated with bringing them together.

Photo by Jannik Skorna on Unsplash