Most of us have a general understanding that ‘games playing’ in relationships is a bad thing – and that all good people are opposed to them. ‘I don’t play games,’ is a favorite mantra declaimed by hopeful people at the beginning of love stories. However, it can be less obvious what games playing really involves – and therefore how to definitively avoid its dynamics.
We too often associate this ‘so
called sport’ with its most obvious manifestations in the dating phase: For
example, when a person hides their desire beneath a veneer of indifference, or
goes cold as soon as love is reciprocated. But there are plenty of other forms
of games playing that far more insidious, invisible, and in the long run
dangerous.
They occur whenever we decide to
stop saying something difficult, vulnerable or hurt that is on our minds and camouflage
an injury instead; we play games when our partner does or says something that
wounds us but we choose not to reveal it, we stay silent and smiley, because to
be honest would make us feel exposed, desperate, cloying and weak in front of
someone who (we fear) might simply not care enough about us to listen.
Therefore, we opt to initiate a
so-called ‘game’ in which we do the following: We bury our ruffled feelings
about this or that problem – but we do so very badly, in the deliberate hope
that our partner will in time realize their offence and then feel sorry for it
and apologize – without us having to be naked about our upset.
The ‘game’ sets out to provoke guilt
as an alternative to emotional frankness. So rather tell a partner cleanly that
we are a bit upset that they didn’t – for instance – buy us the medicine we
asked them to pick up on their way back from work, we play the ‘game’ of
blithely not caring about their forgetting. We stay silent, and then the next morning,
we go to the chemist ourselves, and leave the box and the receipt prominently
on the kitchen table. When (as we had hoped) they spot it and immediately say, ‘oh
god, I’m so sorry,’ we smile causally and reply, ‘oh don’t worry, that is fine,
it wasn’t a bother for me.’
It may seem like a tiny incident but
the seismologists of relationships will know that this is likely to be the
harbinger of something far bigger: a fateful pattern of not declaring what is wrong,
of hoping to be read without explaining, of not daring to speak about matters,
of which can over time lead to a grave erosion of trust and destructive
indirect methods of communication that bring anger and resentment in their
wake.
Games playing is a subset of
behavior we know as Sulking. When we sulk, it is because a partner has in some
way offended us. They have told a story in public that we wanted to be kept
private, they have shown us a lack of tact, they have forgotten an important
occasion, they have failed to listen to us. But the sulker acts as if from an
unhelpfully romantic hope: that they should be interpreted without needing to
speak.
They dream that someone who truly
loved them would guess what they were upset about, without requiring the
offence to be spelt out to them in a medium as clumsy and as slow as language. They
want to be understood without words. Anyone who fails to do this is quickly
taken by the sulker to be badly intentioned. There is little space to believe
in innocent failures of empathy. The partner has merely failed to grasp what is
going on, their failure is willed; they are doing this on purpose.
To a feeling of abandonment, the
sulker adds a layer of persecution. For the sulker, it is a great deal more
tempting to devote the next hours to answering curtly, insisting that nothing
is wrong and affecting a pained and melancholy look – than to strive to
delineate the nature of their hurt.
A true commitment to not playing
games involves a profound effort directly to say everything that has upset us
at once. It could sound like we being ‘difficult.’ However, so long as we are
polite, communicating hurt is anything but poor behavior. It is the greatest privilege
to be in love with a true adult who can tell us what is wrong precisely when a
problem occurs – and is brave enough to present themselves as weak so that love
can stay strong.
