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Busy lives and conflicting schedules create bumpy relationships
By Davie Wong, Sports Reporter
We all enjoy watching athletes perform. It has, since the age of the Greeks, been the go-to source of entertainment. However, we often overlook the amount of time and effort that athletes put forward to prepare themselves.
Professional athletes can often put 40 hours of work a week into practicing and preparing to play. For many of them, their sport becomes their life. This, on top of time spent travelling, means that athletes often have very little time in their lives for things other than their sport.
That being said, we see many athletes entering committed relationships constantly. It’s only fair to ask, do athletes have the time to be in a long-term committed relationship? In my opinion, they don’t.
Athletes are constantly on the move, literally and figuratively. Professional players are always at risk of being traded away to a new city, or not being re-signed by the team they are currently with. How can that sort of uncertainty be healthy for a relationship?
Place yourself in the shoes of the significant other of a professional league athlete. One day, out of the blue, you’re told that your partner has just been sent across the country. You can uproot your life and follow them, or you can stay put and cope with only seeing you partner a few times during the regular season. How does that sound remotely close to fair?
For amateur athletes, the fear of a sudden move is nonexistent, though the financial compensation is nonexistent as well. However, this doesn’t stop most from training just as long and as hard.
Both types of committed athletes can travel a fair deal for their sports. The time spent trekking across the country, and in some cases, the world, can become quite the burden for those seeking a long-term connection. In some cases, pro athletes can spend upwards to a month away from their loved ones. This puts an unbelievable strain on the relationship and could very reasonably, be the reason for a split.
Nonetheless, I suppose that love is love. The cliché is that if you love someone enough, that is all that matters. While others, like myself, cannot understand how the significant others deal with the distance and pressure, there are people who can. While these sorts of relationships are undoubtedly unhealthy, so is junk food, but we tend to disregard that fact fairly often.
