>>55471736I'm gonna be straight with you. I do not get competitive with girls unless I am fully certain they're serious and not kidding and even then I would let them win every so often if I think I could fool them. If it's something they're better than me at I would engage as earnestly as possible and try to win and even play up my tryhard for them.
I am an extremely competitive person in the sense that when something matters to me I will spend hundreds of hours on it, theorycraft, buy books on it and so forth. I will also, if I know that the other people in the room are game, fully involve my present self in whatever random game is in front of me if I like it enough. But being actually super competitive means you're not interested in breaking people's wills to play for no reason. Like... I don't know why being ultra competitive is so associated with sadism. The actual practical effect of being competitive is usually that you get better than your friends and they stop playing with you literally because they don't have fun losing and then you have no one to play with and sometimes you get so desperate you start faking losing or adopting internal handicaps so you can keep improving while still letting them think things are on pretty even ground. I really feel like real competitors:
1. Are willing to keep going even if they lose 100 times in a row, and no I'm not exaggerating. I've had at least five times in my life I can remember losing that many times in a row, a few of those in a single day
2. Always willing to put their heart on the line and not try to fudge over losses with ehhhhhh just a game! If they know they didn't go in with that mentality
3. Always conspiring to build up people around them because the hardest thing for them to find is people who will actually want to go the distance with them and keep growing, so they'll actually go out of their way to nurture people.
Of course I've been salty plenty of times in my life. You can't be competitive and never get salty. But believe it or not the thing that actually makes it lonely is that you see something as a rivalry, you're behind, you work hard to catch up, and after being in the losing end for so long and you start winning you see them slowly lose interest or, even worse, start flipping out. I had a friend that once I beat their Marth once, I remember them rage quitting, they got up, went to their room because we shared an apartment, slammed the door without saying a word and we never ended up playing again. That kind of shit makes us walk around eggshells around others and if someone says oh yeah I'm super competitive I don't really take it at face value until I observe them enough.
I kind of made myself really lonely typing this
