And I guess he is a fun toy for you. Just hope for your sake he is not a player.
No,no,no. Don't hope that he isn't a player. Just hope that he plays fair and is both a good winner and a good loser. There aren't two camps of people some players and some not. There are just people living in denial of certain potentials in either direction. I certainly have player components to my personality. When I was 15 years old I seduced my first lover (gorgeous Black Irish 23 year old ski-bum brother of a friend) with a lame combo of skimpy nightwear stolen from my mother and suggestive Rod Stewart music. The important thing to remember is that "play" is "fun" and "fun" is "attractive" and "sexy." A good part of my contribution to the crappiness of my marriage was the fact that I had a hard time reconciling the roles of player and Mommy. Really, the same problem a lot of the LDW have but just with a different twist. However, I do believe that it is quite likely that if I had done a better job of staying "fun", it just would have led to my marriage dissolving earlier.
Stigmata made a point in one of his posts that he might indicate to a woman something like "I'm a nice person but I'm not a nice guy." Any woman with half a brain will interpret that as "I'm in player mode but I play fair by signaling this clearly." OTOH, NOP who has been married and faithful for umpteen years will post something like "i'm still as dangerous as when I first met MrsNOP." and thereby signal "I'm still enough of a player to be sexy." "Passionate Marriage" can almost be read as a manual on game theory or gaming psychology.
Anyway, at the moment, for better or worse, I am involved in a proto-relationship in which we are both self-aware meta-players. The man I am seeing had a profile on the internet which poked fun at the typical profile by saying something like "Friends first? I say f*ck first, friends later because how else can you know if you want to be friends?" and made some further jokes about the "no games" comments made on many profiles. I responded to his initial e-mail in which he claimed that he could do better than Leonard Cohen by sending him one that said "I thoroughly understand your desire to be contrary a la "f*ck first, friends later. I would add the line "Let's meet in an elevator while we're still strangers" to my profile but then I would be faced with the boring task of having to hit "Not Interested" a bajillion times." So... who's the player?
Everybody wants a mix of "play" and "comfort" in a relationship. If a relationship is a soup, it's like you are always balancing the salt to sugar ratio. Different people have different tastes but in general a relationship with no salt is about as appealing as no sodium soup, you might think it would be good for you but it's so "blah" you just won't want to eat at all.
Anyway, I am curious to see what will happen next in my proto-relationship because I played a straight-up cow card yesterday (though it was half his fault for babbling at me about how much trouble he has getting his kids to eat vegetables when I was literally f*cking exhausted). Will he run in terror from the huge bland suffocatingly bountiful domesticity of my cow? Do I have enough wild cards left in my hand to keep playing? Do I even have a clue what I'm playing for? The other funny thing is we were planning on actually playing board games Friday night but we got sidetracked by sex and when I said to him in faux bragging mode "I am very good at games.", he just looked right at me and said "All women are good at games.". Fun, fun, fun!!!
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
