Life Isn’t a Game

When we’re little we delight in simple stories. The characters are not complex and the implicit rules are easy to grasp. The Walt Disney Corporation has made many fortunes from exploiting our desire for easy-to-grasp.

The problems begin to appear as we grow older. The Western fantasy about finding “the one” and strolling happily off into the sunset hand-in-hand do not prepare us in any way for adult interactions and in fact set us up for painful failure. Human nature is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, of selection pressures that shaped our brains just as much as they shaped our bodies. Human nature is in no way reducible to a Disneyesque fantasy.

I’ve always been struck by the American phrase “he cheated on me.” It implies that relationships are akin to a children’s board game. No one likes a child who cheats at monopoly; no one likes an adult who cheats at the game of relationships.

Except of course real life isn’t a children’s board game and the rules are very different from what we’ve been told. As a result, millions of people each year experience confusion and pain instead of being able to understand what’s really going on. “If she loved me enough, she wouldn’t have cheated” and “if he wasn’t afraid of commitment we’d have a perfect relationship” are merely two out of many false conclusions based on faulty but unquestioned…