What Is "The Game?"

“Checkmate!”

“Dude, what the hell?  You can’t move your pawn diagonally across the board like that!”

“This is my game, and it’s my rules.”

BAM!

“You lost the last round of chessboxing too, idiot…”

I don't like this game anymore...

We’ve all seen Swingers once or twice.  We’ve all also probably seen one or twelve more rom-coms than we’d ever care to admit.  This proverbial “game” is one that has no pieces, no rounds, and no rules.  It is a perpetual shit show of guessing, logic, and pure animal instinct.  And naturally, there's no “winner” or “loser” – there is only success and fail, and even those are really subjective terms.

It’s certainly not as cut-and-dry as “getting laid” or “not getting laid.”

I hope your heart isn't as rusted as your undies

So, how do you play a game like this?

Simple: You play or you don’t.  And make sure YOU set the rules.

The only rule of the dating game: Know what you want.  It doesn’t matter if “what you want” is an incredibly vague half-cocked concept of dating/romance, as long as you’ve taken a little time to decide what you want.

“Well Anonymous, what the hell do you want?”

Are you sure you want to know?

“Do fish poop in the water?”

Touché… 

~

In order to remotely understand what I want out of the dating world, you’d probably have to be either: A) As dark and jaded as me.  B) Divorced at least once.  C) Dumped at least three women in a row without being dumped.

Now, I’ve never been married, but I might as well have been.  Bought a house, became the doggie step-dad, et cetera.  We were together long enough to see someone meet a “special other,” get married, and subsequently divorced.  Close enough for jazz…

I wanted the NFC plates...bitch.

Personally, I’m okay with not knowing what I want.  The things I don’t know what I want are far greater than the things I do know I want.  I’m not wife-hunting, but I can’t arbitrarily rule out the possibility of meeting her.  I do know that my career is an extremely high priority, so hopefully she has one of her own to obsess over.  I do know that I’ll take a big brain over a super-model’s looks. 

Yes, I think Tina Fey is in the Top 3 for sexiest women alive.  I’d take her over Megan Fox in a heartbeat. 

“Wait, what?  You’d rather bone Tina Fey than Megan Fox?  I must have hit you too hard,” says my titanium-knuckled sparring partner.

No, it’s true.  Don’t get me wrong, you know I like looking at dem tatas and booties, but I don’t want to get it going unless you can verbally spar at a high level.  If you can beat me in Scrabble repeatedly, I might marry you…

Okay, so what does that all boil down to?

A) You have a genuine career, or don’t care that mine is borderline insane.

B) You are smarter than the average broad.

C) You don’t care that I don’t care.

Too much to ask?  I don’t think so.

This opens up another huge can of worms though: Gamechangers and Gamebreakers.

Gamechanger = someone/something that will make me change my apathy about starting a family.

Gamebreaker = someone/something that will make me run for the hills and never want to get laid again.

Gamebreakers are more fun, so let’s ponder a few: Mets/Giants/Cowboys/Redskins/Heat/Rangers/etc. fans, ultra-religious, conservatives, idiots, midgets (apologies to the small-statured, you’re just not for me), living outside the urban center of Philadelphia, teetotalers, lushes, addicts, etc.  You get my drift right?  It’s A-OK to have a set of groundrules that will disqualify someone from being an active participant in your life.

[PS - I trolled the interwebs for almost 35 minutes trying to find a picture of the midget hooker I saw in Honolulu, but no luck...  You'll have to use your imagination instead]

Gamechangers are much harder to quantify.  You see, a gamechanger would potentially make any of those aforementioned qualities acceptable.  For the right lady, I would easily consider dating someone who didn’t live in the immediate Philly area, or even a fan of another sports team.  I can’t really foresee politics, intelligence, or religion being changed though.  If you vote Red, go to church/synagogue too often, and/or watch MTV, I’m sorry…

For the right girl, things that were once considered unspeakable may become a reality.  I would consider relocating, as long as it was to a place where I’d be able to get work.  Sorry to the cuties living in Alabama, but y’all can fuhgeddaboudit.

Ideally, the right woman should acquiesce about some of their gamebreakers too.  I’d love to find a woman who shares my desire to live outside of the US, sooner than later.  Honestly, if she doesn’t I don’t think I’ll keep dating her.

Know what you want, or know that you don’t know what you want.  Without a developed sense of self, you have no business dating anyway.

Kim: your soul is about as empty as your eyes.  And I think my eyes are burning from looking at you...
Tell me again why you're on TV all the time?