Taking One for the Team

I find men fascinating. This is not something my husband has to worry about. It isn’t that I want to meet more of them; I’m just interested in them kind of like Jane Goodall is interested in chimps.  Unlike Jane, however, my study of the species is unscientific, unquantitative, and unobjective. Nonetheless, I have reached what I think is an irrefutable conclusion: Men are far superior to women in sustaining important emotional attachments.

Wha-at? Yes, indeed, and here is the evidence that proves my point.

Women have strict requirements when it comes to bestowing their affections, but none of these barriers gets in the way of men. Start, for example, with the biggest obstacle women impose on relationships – they seem to think it is important to fall in love with other human beings. Men are far more open-minded. They become passionate about abstractions. I’m not talking here about the founding fathers and abstractions like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’m talking about the average guy who is head over heels in love with a Team. Pick any sport, pick any country, and it’s the same thing over and over again.

This all became clear recently when, for our grandson’s tenth birthday, my husband and I took him to see a baseball game. It was bobble-head day at the stadium, meaning that if one stood in a ridiculously long line, one could obtain a free bobble-head of the home team third baseman. As we walked past the thousands of (mostly) men inching their ways forward, I found myself hoping that there is a huge secondary market in bobble-heads, that these guys have customers lined up on EBay and Craig’s List to sell this junk to, and that by reselling bobble-heads they are at long last able to make their mortgage payments. In my (femaie) point of view, there would then be a purpose behind this otherwise nonsensical waste of time.

But, clearly, there can’t be enough secondary market bobble-head buyers to provide an economic rationale for this behavior. These guys were standing on the line not for profit, but for Team Love.

Team Love falls way outside the experience of most women. Team Love is abstract, unrequited, unidirectional, and impersonal in the extreme. Team Love is pure and selfless love.

And therein lives another obstacle that women face in forming relationships. Once the female of the species passes early adolescence and evolves beyond a one-way attachment to teen idols, she tends to require that the person she chooses to love actually knows that she exists. In a word, women make demands upon their loved ones. That just ain’t so with Team Love. Those who experience Team Love fall for other people who don’t have a clue that their would-be Lovers are alive. I grant you that guys on the diamond, the rink, the court, or the field, may feel energized by the roar of the crowd, but that doesn’t mean they know or care one whit about their Lovers. Who among us can know, much less love, 35,000 screaming lunatics? Who would even want to? Yet not being known to or loved back by the Team is absolutely irrelevant to the stomping, chanting Lover in the stands wearing a jersey with some other guy’s name on his back.

Here’s another restraint females adhere to in relationships. Putting aside hook ups and self-delusional crushes, women tend to think it is a good idea to have relationships with particular individuals with specific identifiable attributes. Some women like good bodies, some fall for big brains, some go for fat wallets.
The Team Lover, on the other hand, is able to uncouple his emotions from any human characteristics that his love object may possess. The archetypical fan – say a guy from Providence -- loves the Red Sox. He loves them in his teens, twenties, thirties, forties, etc, etc. The faces on the team are forever changing, but the lover’s passion is steady. Loving a team amounts to loving a concept.

I’m just not that open-minded. If a stranger showed up one day in my husband’s suit, I couldn’t transfer my affection to the new guy without missing a beat.
But, hey, not so the Team Lover, who feels emotion based entirely on clothing. Dress a complete unknown in the right jersey and the Team Lover is hopelessly devoted. On the other hand, however, when the once-adored goalie, center forward, shortstop, or right end changes his uniform, the guy becomes a traitor, a creep, and a bum.

There’s yet another way in which Team Love surpasses women’s love. Women can’t share and Team Lovers can. A woman will despise another person if the two of them happen to have a passion for the same love object. Team Love is the opposite. Lovers who love the Team also love each other. In fact, they feel a sense of community. There’s a reason they call it Red Sox Nation.

Finally, the aspirational models of monogamy and family impose constrictions upon women’s love. Societal norms press women into having one love object at a time, with a few children thrown in for good measure. Team Lovers are omniamorous. They are able to love more than one Team at a time, when they are lucky enough that post-season play extends into the next Team’s pre-season schedule. They love their Teams, fellow Team Lovers, and non-Team Lovers, so long as the latter group is merely neutral and not aligned with some other Team.

And this all describes my husband, which is why I am so sure of my conclusions. Unlike me, he loves selflessly and purely, never making a demand, asking for notice, or wavering in his devotion. He is loyal under the most adverse circumstances, and cares little about human foibles in his loved ones. He is openhearted and forgiving. He never gives up on his love, no matter how little evidence there is that it is deserved.

He is the perfect Red Sox fan.

Stacey Brodsky has practiced law, been a stay-at-home mother, and taught middle school English over the course of the 17 years she has lived in Scarsdale with her husband, daughters, and a succession of dogs.