Most mornings, as we sip our coffees, my partner and I play Wordle. It’s a guessing game, dictated largely by chance, and so the outcome doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes his guess wins, sometimes my guess wins, sometimes we yell out the word together.

Word games can bring out a competitive streak within couples.Credit: iStock

The trouble comes when we play Spelling Bee, which is not at all a game of chance. In Spelling Bee, one must unscramble a series of letters to find as many words as possible, including at least one word using all seven letters.

Now, I am a writer. I work with words. I should be good at this game. But “should be” doesn’t always translate to “is”, and for a reason that definitely (maybe? hopefully?) has nothing to do with my intelligence, I am not good at this game. It can take me hours to spot the seven-letter word, and I often miss it entirely. And this would be fine – we’re all bad at something! – except that my partner gets it quickly, almost every single time.

Now, I am not a particularly competitive person, and I am definitely not competitive with my partner. He is way more skilled than me at very many things, and I enjoy this, and benefit from it immensely. But it doesn’t seem reasonable that he can beat me at........

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