Welcome back! Have you got my ebooks - The No Contact Rule and Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl? Also become a fan of Baggage Reclaim on Facebook, follow me onTwitter, and join the forum.
Is there a place for games in relationships? Yes if it’s for sex or because you actually don’t want the relationship to succeed. If you actually do want the relationship to work, game-playing will just ensure that you sabotage it.
People tend to play games because they genuinely believe that this is what you need to do and because they want to gain an advantage, get one over, have the upper hand over a partner. Sometimes you can get away with it, but more often than not, no matter how clever you think you’re being, it’s likely that your actions have registered on the manipulative scale and this puts you on a very bad footing.
If you play games in relationships, you’re actually quite insecure. You don’t trust in things taking a more natural route so you attempt to manipulate the proceedings and the outcome. Whilst you may consider your actions to be quite innocent, most gameplayers would not like the tables turned on them. The trouble is that there are a lot of people playing games out there and this does lead people to believe that this is standard fare in the dating world if the fittest are to survive. It also ensures that the game players vulnerabilities are limited. It’s one thing if you have succumbed occasionally to playing these games but the likelihood is that it’s a dating behaviour of yours, which is limiting your ability to engage in relationships.
Remember that:
You can’t be yourself
You won’t actually know if the recipient of your behaviour is behaving accordingly because it’s what they want to do naturally or because they are knee-jerking to your behaviour, which means that the perception of the person or the relationship can become skewed.
You ruin other people’s ability to trust and judge relationship situations.
You ruin your own ability to trust and judge relationship situations.
Dating becomes a sport, which means that you will become less emotionally unavailable, more of a commitment-phobe and more attracted to the emotionally unavailable, which means that it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of doomed relationships anyway.
I don’t for one moment suggest that people run around wearing their heart on their sleeves, but I do suggest that if you are looking to be in a relationship that involves honesty, trust, open communication, love and care, that you save the game playing for rainy Sunday afternoons when you need to get the Scrabble out or Doctors and Nurses in the bedroom….
