What’s the #22 Reason You Can’t Find Love?

I kind of have a cheap plug.  Since I have spent my life focusing on how to make relationships work, it’s been more difficult than I thought to list why they fail.  

The number 22 reason you can’t find love may be the result of incompetence.  Stay with me.  I think I’m about to offer a different perspective than most of you anticipate.  Number 22 is you

play games in your relationship.  Game is for girls and power is for men.  

If you observe, in any activity, people who are competent understand the rules of engagement.  Then they train themselves and develop a strategy to produce the desired outcome.  Think of a professional athlete.  When you are incompetent, you devise methods to attempt to level the playing field.  Because you know you cannot get what you want based on your current skill set, you play tricks.  This has become known as having game. 

Think about it.  If you are a woman and you want a man’s money and you have nothing to offer, you have to create an illusion that you do have something to offer.  So you make him believe you are so valuable he has to chase you.  When he catches you, he learns you are a commodity and offer the same as other mediocre women.  Except, in the woman’s mind, she won a few dinners or other tokens.  

When she did not get all that she anticipated, she believes she got played and screams victim.  This is usually the outcome for people who play games.  They attempted to get something for nothing.  

For those who believe sex is a gift to men, that is delusional.  Sex is a mutual exchange.  If you are sexually immature and do not understand how to get enjoyment from it, you are responsible for that.  

Game playing is analogous to corporate politics.  In corporate politics, people focus on looking good and making others look bad.  In a company that embraces politics, many win with this strategy.  However, the company and customers lose.  While you are playing politics, you are not getting on with the business at hand.  You are scheming, withholding work or information or sabotaging another.  This is clearly unproductive.

The same would apply on a sport team where you intentionally want to make your teammates look bad.  While you may succeed in making your teammates look incompetent, you lose the game.    

That same mindset is unproductive in an intimate relationship.  The craziest thing is when you finally meet someone you really want to be with, you have no skills to keep them.  You only know how to play games.  Since you never took time to make yourself valuable to another, an intelligent person will see reality of what you offer and walk away.  In some cases, they will take what you offer, which most likely is sex, and ghost you.  Then you feel played.  And there is the punchline.  When you play games, you ultimately play yourself.  This is even the fate of the person who plays corporate politics.  Since they only play games, they will never be competent enough to handle the top position in an organization.  Once given the chance to be in the spotlight, they fail.   

So to all the game players, the joke is on you.