You should cheat on your spouse

I am the lethal combination of a sore loser and smug winner. Like many things, I blame these issues on my family (yet preach accountability as a core value on a regular basis!) When you’re the youngest by six and eight years and the only girl, you grow up in a constant state of wanting to prove that you’re old or mature enough to join everybody else. This led to a cutthroat style of Monopoly earning me the nickname “Leona Helmsley,” tears losing game after game of Hearts only to find out my brothers had me sit in front of the window so they could see my cards in the reflection and bitterness decades later that the first time I was ever allowed to play Balderdash with my aunts and older cousins was the last time I ever saw my family play the game.

A note on the above mentioned game of Balderdash that I still remember, verbatim, my cousin Peter’s epic submission for the word “fricandeau” (pronounced frik-uhn-doh). It was: “the secret ingredient in homey’s crack cookie recipe - example: take the frickin dough out of the frickin oven;” truly a level of cleverness to which I’m still aspiring. If you’ve missed the point of this anecdote and just want to know what fricandeau actually means, it is a roasted loin of veal.

I had to rely on other skills to keep up which led to my domination (on a technicality) in our computer game version of Jeopardy! against my oldest brother only because he made typos inputting his answers and I would then answer second but spell correctly. He then kept the “real” score on a piece of paper to remind me, a 12 year old, that he, the 20 year old, knew more than I did. Even seven-ish years ago, when playing a game of Ticket to Ride with my niece, who must have been five or six at the time, we had created slightly different rules for her and towards the end I had to choose between winning myself and letting her complete the route she was building. This same brother looked at me and asked me if I was so immature that I’d let my niece cry so I could win. I then, showing all my personal growth, placed my train cars elsewhere, and subsequently had my nearly 40 year old brother spend the rest of the night asking me what it felt like to lose to a child.

In summary, blaming my family for my insane level of competition and horrible attitude when losing continues to feel justified to me.

Documented cheating as early as 1594 in Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps from the Kimbell Art Museum. Somewhere my mother is shouting “bosom your cards” to the boy on the left but I’m not sure that would have helped too much.

Jeff and I shared our competitive sides with each other on our very first date when we bonded over our love of math games: mine being 24 and his being Equations. (I could make some kind of self-deprecating joke about how I can’t believe I was still single but we all learned from Lindsay Lohan in “Mean Girls” that math is actually super cool so no need to apologize). He also mentioned that he was amazing at Words with Friends which was very trendy at that time. I’m quite clever with words and we were dating long distance so it seemed like a fun activity.

It turns out he was, actually, truly amazing at Words with Friends and the kind of player who will take hours to think through the best word to play while I, the kind of person who has no patience at all, think that’s a complete waste and play in the moment. When you play in the moment against a super strategic person who plays tons of other people you, ummm, lose. A lot. And I didn’t start dating an older guy with a lot of physical and metaphorical baggage to have my ego bruised so I, naturally, started cheating looking for assistance. Just googling good word choices was the gateway drug but then I found an app where you could screenshot the board and it would make recommendations on the absolute best word to play based on points. I didn’t want to seem too suspicious so I would usually choose the second highest points scorer on the list or adjust if I needed to make sure it seemed like a word I knew.

Does this mean my relationship is founded on a lie? No. But did I wait until after we were married to admit this to him because I felt guilty and thought he might never see me the same way again? Yes.

The thing is, that Jeff is actually nearly as competitive as I am; he just lacks the “emotional range” and/or dramatic flair that I do so it’s not always as visible. But lest you think this person isn’t out for maximum points and glory in any circumstance with a scoreboard, you are mistaken.

Jeff has had his moments of cheating. Before we got married, in our sessions with the minister, we had to take some kind of quiz and he lied on multiple questions (or must have) because the results somehow indicated he was a more balanced person than I even though this man has so many years of repressed emotions that a therapist wouldn’t know where to begin. When we hung up the call, Jeff turned to me and said “looks like I won pre-marital counseling” and then defended his incorrect answers on the quiz by saying “I answered with how I would act in these scenarios once we’re married and not with how I’ve behaved in the past.” This man lied to a Presbyterian minister and considered it a victory!

All of this important background and exposition brings me to summer 2022. We’ve had two bored college kids home in a rental townhouse with uneven floors and it turns out there’s a direct correlation between the evenness of my temper and that of my floors. We attempted some fun family activities to get out of the house and onto normal surfaces but those kept bringing us to situations that required hand-eye coordination — a weakness of mine and a strength for everyone in my home who plays video games regularly. We tried Top Golf which, minus the food and beverage, sat at the center of a venn diagram of things I hated: something I was new to, something I was bad at, something that required upper body strength, something at which Jeff was amazing and something with an animated scoreboard that sort of mocked you if you were terrible. While walking to the car, one child said: “this would have been more fun if you were having fun, Karen.”

Yes, yes it would have been.

In an effort to make sure that Jeff and I stayed on the same page despite the chaos around us, I signed us up for an app that had been heavily promoted to me on Instagram called Paired. (Please note this post is not sponsored and I think the app is overpriced/potentially destroying my marriage but continue to engage with it). Every day there’s a new question for each of you to answer plus a library of games you can do at any time. It’s all a bit silly but a way to keep things light & fun (i.e. be an upper) when you are otherwise annoyed with having too many people plus a one-eyed cat in a small space.

No better way to bond than through affirmation of how right I am!

Unfortunately, with these games comes both the opportunity to win or lose and the opportunity for Jeff to, once again, cheat to win. At the moment, he’s up 19 games to my 11 but regularly when we review his answers, he admits he was confused or answered incorrectly. If you know me, you might be picturing me bullying Jeff into this admissions but here are some recent examples:

1. In a game about naming children, he answered the entire thing as if he had never named three children before and was surprised that my answers took into account the actual choices he had made naming his actual children.

2. In a game about whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, he said he was an ambivert despite the fact that we have had approximately 1000 conversations discussing his introversion.

3. In a game about animals (I think?) he said he was more like a wolf than a tiger despite regularly telling me he’s a cat person over a dog person. And then he argued that tigers were not cats.

A note on the above that the options of animals you could select were: a wolf, a tiger, a capybara and a cockatoo. He was then shocked I said I was a cockatoo (loud, colorful and “not good for first time owners”) and thought I, an avowed cat hater, would have selected the tiger. Unclear how anyone could have watched “Tiger King” with me and associated me with Joe Exotic or Carole.

After every single one of these quizzes, the app asks “did this conversation bring you closer together?” and the answer is: obviously no. I end most of these quizzes angry (even ones I’ve won) and have twice submitted feedback that you should be allowed to correct the quizzes after discussing so that the record is a more accurate reflection of who is winning.

Apparently the point of the app is not to win but then why do they have graphics like this?

The crying emoji doesn’t exactly scream “winning doesn’t matter!”

We’ve looked into cooperative games where everybody wins or loses together but that sort of defeats the purpose to me… how can you support each other for better or worse if there’s no winner or loser? Next week we celebrate our 8th anniversary of a marriage built on the foundations of Jeff lying on a pre-marital counseling survey and me cheating at Words with Friends and I couldn’t be happier.

I mean, I could be happier if I was winning in those Paired games, but outside of that.

Taken right before our wedding ceremony — and a week or two before Jeff found out I’d cheated at Words with Friends. Happy 8 Years!