The General Rules #2 - The Necessity of "The Game" (Part 3)

Remember Candy Land? It's everyone's favorite board game.

If you don't remember or had a deprived childhood there was a main path that lead a winding and colorful road to the finish line. But if you drew special cards or landed on the right spaces you could take shortcuts. The shortcuts sped the game up and allowed the player to skip out of the rigmarole of some of the candy cane curves.

"What we say about love and what we do about love are generally two very different things." (So reads a favorite quotation of the always sage-like Sierra.)

Whence arises this discrepancy? "The Game" may be the cause. We all say we want undying affection, but we aren't willing to pay the price. (Myself included.) We say we can fall in love and that we want to. But we always have a tailor-made excuse ready as to why we don't date as much as we should. Why we don't open our hearts more. Why we don't let people in.

But I believe that this is mostly because we get caught playing the game in a never-ending cycle. Too often we see the mini-heartbreaks turn into massive ones. And it becomes easier and easier to stay in the cycle. The game then becomes a lifestyle. A safe place. A sanctuary from real commitment. We make a home in the molasses swamp. It becomes easier to say we want commitment and affection, that we wish for eternal marriage, that we desire undying love, all while we thwart any attempts with our static behavior. And our words become half-hearted coinage thrown into an empty well. An atheists faith.  

Like Professor Young, we find it easier make our own worst fears come to pass rather than work actively and have our efforts disappointed.

All too often the game becomes life, rather than an event in it. It's easier to be pessimistic about love because we will either see our ideas continually validated or be pleasantly surprised. We can easily fulfill our own dark prophecies about never finding Mr. or Mrs. Right. And if we let the game rule us at least we can always say, "I told you so."

Remember when I said there is more than one path to true love? What I left out is that there are also more preferable paths to true love. Shortcut paths. Gumdrop Passes and Rainbow Trails. The best being the destiny path. This has only recently been drawn to my attention with the recent marriages of my best mission friend and my brother and the engagement of my sister. They have all told me that it "just worked out." God put someone in their path and once the ball got rolling it never stopped. The love took root and has grown everyday. I still will never think it is in any way easy.

 

I think this is because it hurts. Barring the worst case scenario of a breakup, heartache can never truly be avoided, even when destiny uses its wild-card. It hurts immensely to let someone into our two-sizes-too-small hearts. There is an awful sort of realization that happens after we commit to someone; we must now share everything about us. Even the secret corners that we have gone to such lengths to disguise. But in this process of opening and being vulnerable and progressing, we grow. The tandem upward growth trajectory is true love.

A general authority said recently "True love necessarily includes some degree of permanence." And, "[Love] is actively seeking someone else's happiness." Herein lies "The Game's" biggest flaw. And not only because it incorporates neither of those things. Love looks out to others and is always constant, whereas "The Game" consistently looks inward and is ever-changing. It is selfish. It always asks, "How will this make me look?" Whereas love asks, "How will this make someone else feel?"

I've said this before, the very name is at once a perfect definition and a misnomer. It's just a game. While it may be useful sometimes, it will usually never end well, or at least where and when we want it to end. At its best it is a tool, and at its worst a nefarious ruse meant to trap the weak willed and poison them with virus-like commitment issues. It can be exciting sometimes, but I would rather take the short-cut route through candy land. Wouldn't you?

[Keep following, hilarity will ensue.]

The General Rules #2 - The Necessity of "The Game" (Part 2)

A few quotes, you've heard all of these at some point. "How come nice guys never win?" or "How come the pretty girls are always with the cocky jerk in the center of the room?" or "I just want a guy who is sweet!" (As she gravitates toward the next guy who will treat her like dirt and break her heart.) or "Why isn't he/she calling me back?"

At this point in this extended blog post we should all know the answer. Still, it may be helpful to try and give a short definition of what exactly "The Game" is. And what it is not. The watered-down and painfully simple definition is: the set of techniques or actions that a pursuer or the pursued takes to demonstrate a high social value, thus increasing desirability. The more complicated and cruelly frank version of the definition probably goes something like this: the things that boys and girls do to weed out the unfit objects of our affection. In very short terms, it is modern courtship. (This is why this is a three part post. Trying to define this is like trying to grab a slimy toad.)

"The Game" is not intended to be mean-spirited and cruel. (Though sometimes it may be used, wrongfully, to do so.) "The Game" is not your recent boy/girlfriend cheating on you. "The Game" is not meant to consistently break your heart. (Though sometimes it may feel that way.) "The Game" is not easy.

"The Game" functions in different capacities. Sometimes it may be used gain the object of our desires. Othertimes it can be used to tell someone "no" in a subtle manner. And finally, it is not the only path to everlasting love.

To focus in on a narrow complaint about the game, why DO girls end up with guys who consistently treat them like crap? Certainly no girl wants this. They aren't attracted to jerk guys. They are attracted to some of the qualities that most jerk guys have in common. For example, confidence. The love of your life may sit behind you in class for an entire semester, but if he has no confidence to ask you out, there will never be an opportunity. Girls like confidence. Most nice guys aren't as confident as cocky jerks. Thus, most nice guys won't get as many girls. This is one example out of many factors.

So for guys, "The Game" is focused around building these qualities that will help attract girls. For girls, "The Game" consists mostly of playfully denying the men that pursue them. This process is very circular and emotionally exhausting. A "good game" consists of not knowing what is going on. That confusion, those moments of mini-heartbreak, the late nights, the regrets, the coulda-shoulda-woulda thought process, the frustration, all make success so much sweeter, if it ever comes.

Some give up. They experience these mini-heartbreaks and they become so disheartened that they stop trying altogether. They relinquish all hope because it is easier that way. To quote Professor Young again, "...we are afraid our hopes will be disappointed. We don't want to be fooled, and so we create a life or a way of viewing life that is 'fool-proof' --so limited, so empty of vision, that there is nothing to be disillusioned about. Sometimes we even choose to offend those who could be our friends [or lovers], or we choose to demonstrate our own incompetence or irresponsibility, or we choose to imagine a life of intractable pressures, conflicts, and miseries, because we would rather lose everything we can and choose the worst we can imagine than hope for anything and have our hopes disappointed. ...I have always seemed able to make my life miserable and then say to myself, 'At least this is real.' And for some reason it seems that we find it easier to create what we fear and be done with it than to wait in awful suspense until what we fear comes of its own volition."

I think to some degree all of us share the same fear: that one day we will wake up and our partner will not love us anymore. Or that we will wake one morning and inexplicably not love our partner. This fear is deep insecurity manifesting itself. We all share this fear because, at its heart, is the simple fact that we can NEVER be exactly sure how someone feels, about us, about anything. I believe that even when we are in love, we are afraid. We are afraid that someone may be motivated by some strange sense of duty, rather than undying love. That someone may in fact simply feel obligated to love us back. That someone simply is saying one thing, and thinking another. This happens because on the battlefield of love, the lines of communication are badly flawed. We clutch the receiver with white knuckles and hope to receive some validation of feelings, and all we get are words. Words that are so fickle and fragile in their ability to communicate true meaning. Words that leave us wanting. And often do more harm than good.

I will admit, that the higher the level of dedication, the stronger the signal gets on the receiver. With marriage being the ultimate affirming step that both parties understand and want the same thing, and most importantly feel the same way. But even then, the only way to be really, beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt sure is probably through some metaphysical process, two spirits communing without spoken words. It may be good that we distrust words so much, because words can be used nefariously.

The point of all of this is to more fully explain why "The Game" exists. It exists because in those fragile first moments of contact and communication, in order to form a stronger bond later, we need to know what the other side feels like. We need to feel what the other person's rejection of us feels like. We need to experience their (seeming) apathy towards us, we need to feel what it is like to have that person break us. And then when those three feeble words, "I love you" are exchanged, they will have some small meaning behind them. Some honesty. If "The Game" was played, we will know more strongly that they mean what they say, because we know what the opposite feels like, and it isn't this.

[Keep following, I know it was a lot of hard reading. It's like homework.]