Gaming Your Way Into a Relationship

I was having a conversation with a girlfriend of mine this week. The kind of conversation that happens a lot in the age range we share which is when some women seem to get crazy about finding their partner and if they’re so inclined, have babies. It’s an interesting thing to watch given there is so much attention given and material available on how to find the right man, how to attract your divine right partner and the like. We all know the stuff. The fact is, people suck at relationships and all this business designed to game oneself into a relationship has very little chance of impacting love or even more sadly creating a space in which one can thrive.

Here’s how the conversation went: My girlfriend, we’ll call her Jessica, was explaining to me how she was speaking to a potential mate and laying down the law of how she expected him to be with her. Namely, as she had learned in one of the many classes on dating she’d taken, she was not to initiate any kind of communication, keep her cards close to the vest in terms of her availability and wants or desires and generally speaking be “traditional,” letting him drive the experience and rather than being straight, attracting him with her feminine wiles.

I was flabbergasted listening to her embarrassed by my previous attempts to pursue relationship in this way and also heartbroken that this is still a viable strategy for many. Jessica really is looking to create a romantic relationship. The problem is, rather than looking at who she is as a human being and why anyone would want to be in a relationship with her, she’s employing superficial gaming strategies that won’t hold up in the long run. She may catch a man, but she hasn’t addressed how to be a partner once she catches him.

It seems gaming or catching a partner has become the context for starting relationships in many ways. It’s archaic in its model and diminishes all human beings in the process. What’s missing in the whole equation is the first question called: why do you even want to be in a relationship? More importantly: why would anyone want to be in a relationship with YOU?

Much like human beings have done for as long as we’ve been around, I say we’re inclined to look for the easiest way to achieve the end we want, in this case a committed relationship, without doing the deeper work that would actually have the relationship thrive. I work with all kinds of married couples whose relationships aren’t working and all they dream of is being free again without all the responsibilities said relationship came with. We’re never happy. We’re never happy because we’ve turned relationships into a destination versus an opportunity to express ourselves and contribute to another human being.

What this whole model begets is what I want from a relationship, not what I can bring to another human being that’s worth having. It lets us off the hook for being anything other than what will have us get what we want in the short term. It’s killing love and intimacy and the real possibilities that are available in sharing our deepest selves authentically with another human being.

Life isn’t about getting somewhere. Relationships are not something to be acquired.

When I was dating, I played the game. I hesitated to communicate right away not wanting to express that I was into him too quickly. “What if he’s not into me? What if I seem too desperate?” I had to manage so much noise, even getting targeted ads on Facebook about how to be more attractive, more strong, walk away, flirty… you name it, I probably got an ad for it. Have you seen all these dating courses?! It was hellish but I took it on as a social experiment. I dated with fervor, sometimes going on two dates in one day for efficiency’s sake! The struggle is real am I right? It was exhausting and tumultuous and exciting all at the same time.

There came a point in the process when I began to question why I was engaged with it at all? If I had to work this hard to find a partner, was it really worth it? Shouldn’t it be organic? Wouldn’t there be this moment where I walked into a coffee shop and caught a man’s eye and he caught mine and that was it? Well, it wasn’t. I was online, going speed dating, generating whatever action I could to get myself exposed to as many men as I could. It’s a numbers game after all, right?

Well, that didn’t work. I met lots of great men, a few of whom wanted to be with me, some I even dated for a short while, but it inevitably ended up with me feeling disingenuous or disappointed. There was a specific moment in time where I had a thought. The thought I had was, “Why would anyone want to be with me?” At first, I had a laundry list of great qualities that I’d worked hard to develop, my joie de vivre and whatever else I could glom on to as an expression of my worthiness. When I thought more deeply about it, however, I realized that I didn’t want to start a relationship based on the premise that I deserved to be in one. Rather, I no longer wanted to pursue relationship at all, as a pursuit that is. I wanted to be so fully myself, so fully engaged with life that all my relationships thrived and everyone around me was fulfilling on what they wanted. Intimacy became the name of the game, not romantic intimacy, but intimacy shared from one human being to another.

To be clear, when I say intimacy, I mean that deep connectedness that allows us to be fully ourselves with another. I shared that with my friends, with my family, with strangers I’d meet along the way. I peeled back the layer between myself and life and had the experience of being in love with life itself. Maybe for the first time ever.

I still had to deal with the constant barrage of thoughts about wanting the special one and wanting to grow old with someone and wanting to know that I was desirable enough for someone to choose me alone above all others. That was always there. I just chose to let it be. I was never single, even though I wasn’t partnered. I always had people. The richest experiences found me, and they had nothing to do with being with the one. They had to do with being deeply connected no matter who was around. Therein I found love. I found myself. I found what was possible when I stopped having it be about that thing called acquiring a relationship and I found who I wanted to be in the world for all people.

Once I found myself, my love found me.

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