Athletes and relationships: love between training, travel and competition

“I know it matters. Just tell me when I matter.”

It is said in the kitchen at half past nine in the evening, while he packs his bag for tomorrow’s training camp. Nobody shouts. She is not asking him to stop training, and he does not think she fails to support him. They both know the next competition is important — and that is exactly why the sentence can never quite be heard. Who complains about something so obviously important?

When I talk with people about relationships in which one partner is an athlete — a professional, a semi-professional, or an amateur who trains like a professional — this scene comes back in different forms. In such a relationship, sport is not a hobby. It is a schedule, a diet, sleep, injuries, travel, sponsors, coaches and the mood after a match. It is almost a third member of the relationship. In this post I want to write about how you live with that third member: about the partner as support and as the one who waits, about work nobody sees, about one person’s career that sometimes comes at the other’s expense, and about what happens to a couple when the career ends.

I am writing from the perspective of marriage and family therapy, not sport psychology. I am not a sport psychologist, and I will not write about preparing for competition, training or performance. What interests me is the relationship — what is left once the bag has been unpacked.

A relationship with a third member

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we see a couple as a system. This means that when something changes for one person, it changes for the other too — and that every relationship has its own unwritten rules: who adapts, who decides, what is never talked about. In a relationship with an athlete, one rule is almost always written in capital letters: sport comes first.

At the beginning this can even be attractive. Partners are often drawn precisely to the drive, the discipline, a body that can do more than they thought possible. The problem is not that sport comes first. The problem arises when that rule was never spoken, agreed and checked — when it applies simply because it always has. Then the partner slowly begins to feel they are competing with something nobody can compete with. Who would ask for more time from someone training for the national championships? And so they ask for nothing, until one day they ask for everything at once.

John Gottman’s research on how couples seek connection in everyday life is very telling here. Gottman observed how partners send each other small “bids” for attention — a remark, a question, a touch — and how the other responds. Couples who were still together six years later turned towards such bids in roughly 86 per cent of cases; couples who had split up did so only about a third of the time. What made the difference was not the big moments but the small, everyday ones. For a couple in which one person is often away, this is both bad news and good news. Bad, because there are fewer small moments. Good, because you do not have to wait for a joint holiday to strengthen the relationship — a message from the airport counts, and so does asking about your partner’s day after a match, not only telling them about yours.

Support you cannot see

When people describe the partner of an athlete, they almost always use the word support. The partner supports: comes to matches, listens after a defeat, adjusts the cooking, does not plan parties before an important event. But support is more complicated than it looks.

Niall Bolger and his colleagues studied couples in which one partner was preparing for a demanding bar exam. They found something surprising: the support that helped most was the kind the person preparing did not even notice — the partner quietly took over errands, for example, without making a point of it. Support that the recipient clearly perceived as help sometimes even increased their distress, probably because it reminded them that they could not manage on their own. The researchers called this invisible support.

For the athlete this is good news: the best support does not take away their sense of being equal to the challenge. For the partner, though, there is a trap in it. If their work is most effective when nobody sees it, then nobody really does see it. And what is not seen is not thanked, acknowledged or returned.

The partner’s invisible work

If the partners of athletes wrote down everything they do, the list would look something like this: they take over the household and the children during training camps, fit holidays around the competition calendar, skip social events because training starts at six tomorrow, manage the mood at home after a bad result, take the phone calls about injuries, deal with relatives who ask “when will this sport thing finally be over”, and often end up without anyone to listen to them.

In relationship psychology this is sometimes called emotional labour: taking care that the other person is all right, that things do not fall apart, that the atmosphere is as it should be. It is unpaid, it does not appear on any results table, and it does not end with the final whistle.

I am not writing this to cast the athlete as the one who takes. Most athletes one might meet in therapy love their partners very much and are grateful to them. The problem is not gratitude; it is that gratitude is general while the work is concrete. “Thank you for supporting me” is not the same as “I know you took our child to your mum’s on your own three weekends in a row because I was at a tournament.” The first sentence is kind. The second says: I see you.

The one who waits

Besides being a supporter, the partner has another role that is talked about less often: they are the one who waits. They wait for the result, for the call after the match, for the scan results after an injury, for the decision about a contract, for the end of the season, for the day when there will “finally be more time”. Waiting is a particular kind of strain because there is nothing to do. You cannot complete it; you can only bear it.

In a couple this often shows up as a mismatch. After a match the athlete comes home exhausted, empty or disappointed — and needs quiet. The partner has spent the whole day waiting, following the live stream, perhaps looking after the children alone — and needs connection. Both are right. And both can feel abandoned while sitting in the same room.

(composite, not a real person)
She: “I watched the results on my phone all day. When you lost, I texted you straight away. You didn’t answer until eleven at night.”
He: “Because I couldn’t. I didn’t want to hear anyone.”
She: “I’m not anyone. I’m me.”
He: “I know. But when I lose, it feels like I’ve let you down too. It’s easier to stay quiet.”
She: “And in that silence I think you don’t need me.”

This short exchange holds a pattern we often see in couples: under stress one person withdraws, and the other, faced with the withdrawal, pushes. When the first withdraws, the second feels fear; when the second pushes, the first feels an even stronger need to withdraw. I have written more about this dance in The anxious and the avoidant partner: why these two find each other. With athletes it is amplified by the shame that follows a defeat — I write about how athletes process failure in Defeat, mistakes and shame. What matters is that nobody in this conversation is the enemy. Both are trying to protect the relationship, each in their own way, and each hurts the other by doing so.

One career at the other’s expense

One of the hardest themes in these relationships is a question the partner often does not dare to ask out loud: How much of mine have I given up for yours?

A sporting career runs on a clock that does not wait. The window in which an athlete can reach their peak is relatively short, and that gives a strong argument to one side: “Now or never.” So the partner often postpones a move, new studies, a job in another city, a child, their own ambitions. Sometimes this is a considered joint decision and feels fair. Sometimes it happens gradually, through a series of small adjustments, none of which seemed big — until one day the partner realises that their life is arranged around someone else’s competition calendar.

The key question is not whether it is right for one person to adapt. Almost every couple adapts more to one partner during some period. The key question is whether it was a decision you both made, and whether there is an agreement about when and how the scales will tip back. In relational therapy we say that a relationship needs fairness — not necessarily equality at every moment, but a sense that what each person has given is seen and balanced out over time.

Without that agreement, an unacknowledged sacrifice easily turns into resentment. And resentment rarely comes out directly. It shows up as cynicism before the next match, a forgotten birthday, a remark in front of friends, coldness in bed. At that point it often seems to be about something else — the dishes, money, the mother-in-law. I have written about why arguments so often circle around the wrong subject in It is not about the dishes.

It is also worth looking at the other side: athletes often carry guilt too. They know their partner is giving, and it weighs on them. Some cannot talk about it, because admitting the cost would mean having to pay it — and right now they cannot. Their silence is then not indifference but helplessness.

When stress moves in: injury, a bad season, an uncertain contract

Guy Bodenmann and his research group spent decades studying how external stress — at work, with health, with money — enters a relationship. He found that stress which happens outside the relationship spills over into it: partners have less patience, less time for each other and more misreadings. At the same time he showed that couples who cope with stress together — who talk about it, relieve each other and share the load, which he calls dyadic coping — are more satisfied. A meta-analysis he published with colleagues in 2015 confirmed the link between coping together and relationship satisfaction across a large number of couples from different countries.

For an athlete such stress is plentiful and often dramatic. An injury can change everything in a moment: the schedule, finances, the body, identity, plans. The athlete is often irritable, closed off, sad or anxious, and the partner finds themselves in the role of carer while being frightened themselves. Some couples grow very close during such a period. Others drift apart, because each carries their fear alone.

It helps if the couple realises there are two kinds of stress: his stress and our stress. The injury is his, but the uncertainty about the future is shared. When they talk about it as shared, they have a better chance of carrying it together as well. In the knowledge base you will find a short explanation of co-regulation — how two nervous systems settle alongside each other.

When the career ends — as a couple

Everything I have written so far seems as if it will be solved by the end of the career. More time, less travel, more weekends together. Often the opposite happens. Retirement is one of the hardest turning points for an athlete, because they lose not only a job but part of their identity, the rhythm of their body, a team and the sense of being exceptional at something. A review of research on athletes’ transition out of sport, published in 2013 by Sunghee Park, David Lavallee and David Tod, showed that the transition is easier when the athlete has not built their identity on sport alone, when the ending is planned, and when they have social support — with the partner often the first and closest source of it.

For the couple, however, this means something unexpected: the relationship has to be renegotiated. A partner who for years organised life around absence now has someone at home who does not know what to do with themselves. Rules that held for a long time — who decides about the weekend, who looks after the children, whose schedule matters — suddenly no longer apply, and there are no new ones yet. Some couples only really get to know each other at this point. And some discover that for years they lived side by side rather than together.

This transition is not necessarily a crisis for the relationship, but it can reveal one. It often shows whether the partner grew in their own direction while sport was in the foreground — I have written about how a couple deals with two separate paths that need to meet again in When your partner grows in another direction. I write in more detail about what happens to a person when they stop competing in When the career ends: who are you when you are no longer an athlete.

In relational therapy we talk a lot about differentiation here — the ability to remain yourself within a close relationship. A partner who kept their friends, interests and plans throughout the career will often be less shaken when it ends. And an athlete who had room to be something other than an athlete will find it easier to discover who they are now.

Some couples get through this transition with a new shared project. Others need some time to learn how to be in the same space without a competition calendar. Both are fine. What matters is that they do not go through it in silence, as if nothing had happened.

Exercise: a conversation about the invisible

This exercise is meant for a couple in which one partner is an athlete, but it works for any couple where one person has a very demanding job. You can do it today; it takes about half an hour.

1. Each of you writes a list. Ten minutes, each on your own sheet: what have I done in the past month to keep our life running? Not just the big things — the forgotten, small, invisible ones too. The athlete should also include what they do for their sport, because that is part of your shared life as well.
2. Swap lists and read in silence. No comments. Just read what the other has written and mark three things you did not know about or had forgotten.
3. Each of you picks one thing and says it in a full sentence. For example: “I didn’t know that every evening I was at training camp, you texted your mum to ask whether she could look after our child the next day.” No “but”, no excuses.
4. Each of you names one thing you would like in the coming month. Not as a reproach, but as a request: “I’d like you to send one message after a match, even if it’s just: I’m alive, I need some quiet, I’ll call tomorrow.”
5. Agree on when you will repeat the exercise. Ideally at the start of every new stage — before the season, after an injury, when a contract changes.

If you need a few more questions to open the conversation, you will find them in the knowledge base under questions for a couple’s conversation.

Where this post does not apply — and when to see someone else

I want to be clear here, because much of this post is easy to over-generalise.

Not every problem in the relationship is about sport. Sport is a very convincing explanation for everything that goes wrong — so convincing that it can hide old patterns that would be there even if you both worked in an office. If a couple has been arguing about the same things since their first year, it is probably about something that began before the sport, not because of it.

For sporting performance, the right person is a sport psychologist. If an athlete needs help with pre-competition nerves, concentration, routines or returning after an injury, that is the work of a sport psychologist. Couples therapy deals with the relationship, not the result. I have described in more detail when you need one and when the other in my post on psychotherapy for athletes.

When there are health problems in the background, the first port of call is a doctor. Long-lasting insomnia, a marked change in mood, eating disorders, problems with alcohol or painkillers, thoughts of death — all of these need a doctor or psychiatrist first, and only then couples therapy. In athletes such problems can hide behind the word “tiredness” for a long time. If you or your partner find yourselves in this kind of distress, you can call the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day) or the Crisis Line in Slovenia on 01 520 99 00 (between 7 pm and 7 am), and in an emergency 112.

Violence is not a communication problem. If a relationship involves control, threats, humiliation or physical violence, couples therapy is not the first step. Safety comes first. Help is available from the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence in Slovenia on 080 11 55 or from the police on 113.

What couples therapy can offer

In couples therapy we do not look for someone to blame, and we do not decide whether sport is worth the sacrifices. Only the partners can decide that. Together we explore what is going on between them: which agreements were spoken and which were only assumed, how each of them responds to stress, what each brings from their own family. Athletes have often grown up in families where results mattered a great deal — sometimes more than feelings. The partner may have grown up as the one who took care of everyone. When these two patterns meet, they fit together almost perfectly — and that is precisely why they are so hard to change.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking couples. If you are in a relationship where sport is the third member and it feels like you can no longer make it all fit, this may be a good time to talk together — even if one of you is a little more hesitant. I have written about whether it makes sense when only one partner wants therapy in When only one of you wants therapy.

What to remember

• In a relationship with an athlete, sport is often a third member — the rule “sport comes first” can work well if it is spoken and agreed.
• Invisible support helps the athlete most, which is exactly why the partner’s work needs to be noticed and named.
• The partner is not only a supporter but also the one who waits — and waiting is work too.
• One career at the other’s expense can be fair if it is a decision you both made, with an agreement about when the scales tip back.
• The end of a career is not only a relief — it is a transition in which a couple has to agree anew on who they are.