Us and Them

A woman I know says that she married her husband before she saw what he was like during football season. His interest in the prospects for his team turned out to be what seemed to her an obsession that crowded out lesser concerns, making her wonder where the man she thought she knew had gone. He spent hours studying the news about his team and regarded missing one of their games as unthinkable. When the team did well, he was thrilled; when they did badly, he suffered. Not everyone is fanatical about a sports team, but all of us know what it means to get vicarious satisfaction from identifying with particular groups.