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When I was a child (…), my friends would want to play “mums and dads”. Even as a seven year old, I had the intuition to know that it wasn’t a scenario fit for a game. Instead, I wanted to sit in a tree and put grass in my mouth and pretend to smoke.

 

People play games. It is what we do. Like breathing or getting excited over two-for-one Quarter Pounders. We play tennis. Cricket. Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Donkey. They are all fun. And all of these games, and others, are relatively similar, as everyone is involved for relatively the same reason/s and hope that there is at least a drink at the end of it.

 

I can get excited about the odd game of football and, recently, tennis. But I can’t get excited over People Games. It is one sport in relationships (the other, obviously, being sex) where I have to enforce that whether played incorrectly or correctly there will be no Love All at the end of it. And, for me right now, not even a drink.

 

The little Midget Pessimist that sometimes awakes within me occasionally thinks that one is a Whore If You do and a Whore If You Don’t. This is because the games involved in just getting someone to Like You, apparently, have opposite results but the same implication.

 

I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I am going to be called a Whore, I would prefer there to at least be an orgasm involved somewhere in the scenario.

 

I have never [knowingly or intentionally] played a game with a boy in my life. Some may think I am [or have], but I have to enforce that it is probably because my feelings simply did not match theirs. It isn’t a game, it is unattraction. And, in some scenarios, whether I have slept with the boy or not, he has concluded that I am a Whore.

If I like a boy, I make it blatantly obvious. If I invite a guy to my house at two o’clock in the morning, I have sex with him. And if I don’t like him anymore, I call him a cab, pack him a lunch and set him up with a new girl.

 

Recently, many of my guy friends have been alerting me/complaining to me about the Games People Play. Maybe I have been relatively oblivious to this, or maybe I have just been too consumed with playing the game of tennis alongside The Crush to notice, but the urgency and annoyance of the scenario appears to have intensified.

 

Because, biologically, I am a girl, these boys seek me out to learn the female answer to the game of sex.

“She is insane,” I often hear. “She invites me to her house at two o’clock in the morning and then just goes to sleep. What is up with that?”

“She is crazy,” I am told. “She won’t tell me what she wants from me.”

“She is a whore,” some insult. “She is talking in riddles.”

 

While often a trader to my gender in the name of Relationship Realities, People Games is the one scenario where I stay completely neutral. Because both sides of the [sex] position are complaining that the other is playing games. The result is like going back and forth like a tennis ball: It is never going to get interesting and move on unless someone hits it out or scores.

“I don’t know why she won’t have sex with you,” I respond to the horny ones. “I don’t know what else to do with a boy who is in my bed.”  

“I don’t know why she won’t tell you,” I say to the oblivious ones. “Have you asked her personally?”

And, “Maybe she thinks you are talking bullshit?”

 

Games only exist when communication doesn’t. There is so much fear with getting rejected, or putting ones self on the line, which possibly stems from not getting picked for a game of football in primary school and has crossed over into the adult game of life, that the logical alternative is to stay unnecessarily mysterious. So instead of screaming, in the nicest possibly way, “Pick Me!”, we play People Games while bitching about the People Games.

 

It protects us, sure. But it stops us from getting what we want. Kind of like a ball cup in cricket.

 

If everyone understands that, ideally and ultimately, ninety-nine percent of our romantic relationships in life Will Fail, relationships no longer become a game. They become practice for the ultimate Grand Slam.

Who wants to get to that Special relationship and find that they have no idea how to communicate because they just spent the past five years playing People Games out of fear or Tennis out of necessity [to see a hot shirtless boy]?

 

I spend a lot of time philosophising a solution to girls playing games. But I can’t come to a solution unless I accept the reality that boys are perpetuating it. It is the eternal question of what came first: the game or the game.

The only solution, therefore, is that the rules need to change.

 

I told The Crush that I have A Crush.

“Wow,” he responded [eventually]. “I have never had a girl be so honest about That.”

“That,” I responded, “Should not be a unique quality to me.”

It should be generic. Something we all do. A game that is appealing because of its ratio to success, not its tendency to crash.

 

Because as much fun [or success] people think they are getting if they play People Games, the reality is that it is childish. As an adult, there is nothing like the liberation of winning the Bullshit Game against yourself.

 

“So why doesn’t she have sex with me?” My horny friend insisted.

“Why are you asking me?” I screamed. “Ask Her.”

 

 Post By Salium.