Playing By The Rules: The Game of Life and Love

I love games. Big fan. Cannot begin to describe how much I love them. Board games that is. Monopoly, Yahtzee, Poker, Game of Life, you name it. I may not be good at them, I may never win, but I will still play. Every time.

Its easy to enjoy a game with friends because in the end its not about winning or losing. It is about spending time with people you love, about having a good time, sharing a laugh. Making memories in the process. Some of my fondest childhood and teenage years memories involve board games. The hours mum, my brother and I spending hours playing card and Yahtzee. A. teaching me poker. My Tassie friends and I playing Monopoly for 7 hours straight.  

Playing games with people is the exact opposite of fun. It makes people become irrational, it hurts them. It exposes who the person playing the games truly is, shows their true colours. We have all gone and played games with someone at one point or another.Whether it was with good or bad intentions. No matter how much we might hate ourselves for doing so, we are just people and a lot of people play games.  

Playing games with someone doesn’t feel good. If anything it makes us feel terrible, maybe even a little evil. It certainly does for me. Playing games means lost sleep, headaches and that awful guilty feeling in your gut. Sometimes you find yourself playing games without wanting to. Simply because you are caught in someone playing games with you and that leaves you with two choices: play along or walk away. 

There is an entire book dedicated to playing games; Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider's "The Rules". It is meant to teach us, as women, we need to be unavailable, unattainable if we want to successfully play the game of life and love.

"We began to notice that the women who played hard to get, either deliberately or by accident, were the ones who got the guys, while the women who asked guys out or were too available were the ones who got dumped. We put two and two together, and wrote and wrote, and that’s how The Rules were born." 

The authors claim that Kate Middleton got to be a princess by being 'A Rules Girl'. That you should never accept a date for the weekend if you are being asked past the Wednesday deadline. And a million more things. 

To me, all these rules, take away so much of our individuality. They turn something that should be fun and exciting, much like a board game, into a strictly spelled out science. They teach us to play games. I always thought that there would be a time when playing games would be over. When we would be too old for it. Or when it finally would stop being ‘fashionable’. Life would be simpler without games.

They say “Lucky at cards, unlucky in love.” So far, luck hasn’t been on my side in either. Losing is never fun, but losing in a game is less painful, less humiliating, less exposing. Its like ripping of a Band-Aid: short lived pain. 

Losing in love is so much more complicated, consuming and breathtakingly painful. It takes time to heal. It is impossible to estimate how much time it is going to take. Or how many stupid decisions you while making while healing. Losing a someone you loved often means losing a friend. More than just a friend because they shared something so much more intimate with you. But a friend non-the-less. Losing in love is as bad as losing a best friend. Often, the two come hand in hand. 

Sometimes though, just sometimes, we have to choose to lose. May it be to make someone feel better. To not upset the kids. May it be to encourage them in whatever kind of relationship you may be having.

Love, no matter what form it takes, is meant to make us strong. Make us want to be better people. Kinder, more generous. More forgiving. Make us see the world through rose glasses. But it does not always work that way. Sometimes love can make us weak, make us crumble. It can drain us of energy, make us forget about all the good things in our lives. The important things.

And that is when we have to choose to lose. When the overall pain will be lesser in losing than in winning. If you can even call it that. It will still hurt to lose. It always does. Somehow I like to thing that it is losing that makes us stronger too.In the long run this choice, the refusal to play games anymore, taking your life in your own hands and walking away from what is slowly breaking you into pieces, will be the right one. That is the day when games can be fun again. Board games that is. Unless you really dislike board games too, then maybe, just maybe, you will never enjoy any kind of games. Sometimes I think that you are the lucky ones.