The GAMES LOVERS PLAY: Teetering on the Brink of True Love

By marcia singer

Finally, understand --and shift-- what's kept you and your lover/partner on an endless seesaw of frustration and heartbreak. Find out what keeps the same unfulfilling patterns in place in our love lives. (Therapists: great tool for you as well!) Learn the Timeless 12: Love Lessons, Lover Arche"types"/duos, Games, and Ideals each couple unconsciously strives for. Learn a new paradigm for resolving conflicts, a novel new theory balanced with gentle humor and advice. Feel inspired, not defeated. Author testimony, praise from her mentors, as well as professional and lay friends is provided.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387617227

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The initial manuscript for The Games Lovers Play was written in 1996. It was based entirely on my own love life experiences, and provided a vehicle for me to understand my troubling patterns with personal lover relationships. I was moving through another heart-wrenching break-up, steeping in a personal menopausal initiation cauldron as well—and bearing up under my astrological Chiron Return (think Wounded Healer) and feeling terribly despondent: Why go on, if I couldn’t win at ‘love?’ Fortunately, an unconditionally loving friend came to my rescue, and I came to my senses. What was needed was a hiatus from relationships, to find—and love—myself, instead of trying to find another lover to rescue me from my fears of unworthiness. That meant staying away from sexual encounters (going solo instead), reclaiming, trusting my wildish self. I clearly had not partnered without either losing myself by trying to please and avoid conflict, or establishing rigid rules and boundaries, trying to establish safe space. So, in a first year of chosen celibacy, hormonal shifts, and beaucoup inner reflections, The Games book was born—to be relegated to a box with other incomplete projects.

  Little did I know that year long hiatus would extend and become a Path: to become a Lover of life itself; to embrace falling in and out and back into Love, and into the experience of being in divine relationship with all living things (starting with myself!) As the Lakota Sioux prayer teaches, Mitakuye oyasin: We are all Relations. I couldn’t have imagined that twenty-five years down the dharma road, I’d unexpectedly reclaim the manuscript. In 2019, I’d reconnected with the only other person who’d ever read The

Games, a former editor friend, Sofia. But it would be the autumn of 2021 that she would happen to ask me whatever became of that book she’d looked over? Nothing, I admitted. The next day, I unearthed it from its coffin. Sofia’s original suggested edits, along with a small page of dainty notes was still paper-clipped to the cover. Flipping through the pages, I recalled my many paramours, and the friends whose shoulders I cried on—all those dramas that breathed life into my book’s characters…

    Has much really changed for lovebirds? So often, they’re still teetering between heaven and hell. So, in hopes of inspiring more honest loving, less heartbreak and fewer disasters, I’ve resurrected the dirty-dozen: twelve erroneous notions about amorous relations guaranteed to louse up our love lives. Each one is held beneath consciousness, placed there by less-than-functional socialization. And kept in place by masquerading as realistic expectations for a kind of perfection that ordinary ‘reality’ doesn’t deliver. Yet ironically, within the deep Heart of each imperfect striving, is a soulful Ideal about true love that does exist—in Spirit. Attuned to Spirit, we experience unconditioned love, a wondrous state that lovers intuitively sense is possible! The problem is that we unsuspecting lovers either can’t attain our ideals at all, or sustain them for long, because, well, we’re all so human. The Games offers analysis and soulful affirmations for each of the twelve lover types, pointing us toward Presence, towards transcendent, soulful, loving experience. I believe we’re all evolving souls, who suffer from ignorance of our greater, divine nature. Round the wheel of lovers’ karma we go, playing out our cultural myths about true love. We’re hoping they’ll deliver us from the heartaches of life — rescue us from our worrisome, potentially unlovable, not-quite-divine selves. But trying to live according to hidden, mistaken assumptions about whom and what we are only brings misery into our love lives. As we struggle to fix things, the sticky webbing of our unconscious conditioning tightens around us. We can’t win our love game, our strategies fail. Something will have to wake us up, compel us to question the beliefs and expectations derailing our efforts. Only then can we make more conscious, beneficial choices, feel how things are getting better.

BOOK CONCEPT, FORMAT, METHOD:

The Games Lovers Play exposes twelve self-defeating myths we’re taught to believe about what true love is, that actually keep us apart. These subversive myth-conceptions are unwittingly entertained by lovers around the globe. Partners and dating couples are unprepared for the confusion and heartaches ahead. They can’t spring open the painful traps they step into, shift into more fulfilling expectations. This book endeavors to be a way shower by bringing buried beliefs to the surface, and by providing a practical technology for easing on down the mindful road.

I’ve related each myth-conception to a true love Ideal, as well as to a game and a love lesson to be learned. Each game has a see-sawing nature, and presents specific types of dramas/stories with associated habits of relating. Each drama is illustrated by a corresponding archetypal lover team—the players who act out the dramas (Siamese Twins, Intensifiers, Soulmates, etc.) Another way to look at it, is that each pair is presented with a particular love lesson, inherent in the experience of imbalance around one of the dozen Ideals. We’ll relate to this imbalance as the shadow polarity¹ a la the ground-breaking work of Doug Gillette and the late Robert Moore. These patterns of imbalance are acted out in a seesaw-like fashion, as if the conflicting lovers are searching for equilibrium. For example, Soulmate lovers are learning about blissful union. Here, a perfect state of balance, represented by the center of their seesaw, suggests an experience of an everlasting, unbroken love connection. This is the soulful, fully actualized archetype in its fullness.² However, since this pure state is seldom held, Soulmate types must opt for being realistically inspired towards their Ideal. A soulful Affirmation is offered for each archetypal pair, pointing to the way out of their dilemma.

SEE-SAWING

    We’ve seen that the imperfect, imbalanced state of affairs involves conflict between two opposing possibilities, like ends of a teeter-totter. Conflict sets the teetering game in motion. We have two opposing lover players representing two basic, different, opposing and imbalanced ways of relating to a particular Ideal: One over-identifies with the Ideal, the other partner under-identifies³. These two positions are represented by a (+) positive/yang energy sign or a (–) negative/yin energy sign. In our Soulmates example, being a Pollyanna is the positive, overly identified, more assertive positioning, while being a doubting Thomas is the negative opposite pole. A Soulmates’ game involves conscious attention to balancing idealism or cynicism with realism, but one that includes tuning in to Divine Possibility too. This balancing of the ‘tension between the opposites’ renders the polar opposites as complimentary.⁴ Otherwise, the Soulmates type cannot build the staying power needed to face the growth conflicts that inevitably arise in relationship, bringing tensions that feel anything but blissful.

Apparently, laws of energy—of attraction and repulsion—are at work in relationships⁵ as well as in the cosmos at large. Our lover games reflect those laws, both of duality (the play of opposites) and of paradox (two opposites existing simultaneously as compliments.) Duality is either-or thinking and paradox is both-and. I’ve discovered another fascinating paradox. While the laws of lover gaming dictate that like attracts like (such as two people being attracted to the same myth-conceptions), opposites attract as well. That is, opposing positions or charges are also drawn to one another, and don’t exist without the possibility of one another. From the both-and paradox, we can experience opposites also as compliments, when seen from a central or Bigger Picture. In each of the twelve games, one lover hangs out unwittingly at one end of their learning see-saw and attracts a lover at the other end. The swinging or vacillating back and forth can be modest, or dramatic. It can be close to or far off the neutral center of loving possibilities. The centering point of view is a very freeing one. From here, theoretically, you can consciously choose and create Love, instead of flip-flopping in confusion, hurt or anger. Instead of jockeying for position, you have the steadying central awareness. Dr. Sidra Stone and her late husband Dr. Hal Stone referred to this evolution as the aware ego process. Awareness infiltrates our choices, over time lessening the effect of—or perhaps even erasing—the former knee-jerk programmed reactions of the operating ego.⁶  At some point, it becomes timely to get off the panic pendulum. Either you’ve experienced all the important, relevant conflict possibilities, or have gotten so weary that you simply surrender. You declare yourself ready to learn your love lessons. Miraculously, as you let go of trying to control the see-saw, you find yourself hovering at the central, empower-producing zone. This position of awareness enables us to exercise choice, and helps to ensure the success of our relationship.

    Lovers’ soulful work of balancing the yin and yang poles takes place within ourselves, and from without. The one serves the other, and regardless of the gender of either party. The outer balancing act is achieved largely by the willingness to face any presenting oppositions, embracing and integrating what they might offer. From within, integration is about discovering that the end result is waking up and smelling the love roses more potently and more often.

Relationship energetics⁷ are complex beyond the scope of this book. But working with the energy dynamics may present entirely new ways of thinking and being. The Games introduces the basics, trying to offer relatable characters and dramas, yet enough sophistication to serve a deeper probe to assist the behavioral changes we desire. Certainly, variations on the central themes are potentially endless, and real-life lovers are far more complex than our storied examples. You and your honey are probably influenced by more than one of our archetypes, playing more than one lovers’ game. What’s more, all lover types may be found in both men and in women, though some, perhaps due to acculturation, will tend to be more gender specific. And while all the lover types may be familiar to you, you may identify more strongly with certain ones. Identifying which type you are and/or tend to attract is a good first step towards deliverance from bondage, and from dead-ending in heartbreak. The next step, experiencing the teeter-tottering, is harder to do. Learning how to balance is last, but it follows right on the heels of each successive aha!  There may even be more than the twelve faulty love lines explored in this book: The examples given are not meant to be exhaustive. There’s also a suggested list of resources at the end that may enlighten and uplift, and further your study.

    Here’s a toast to reducing the severity of relational injuries we lovers encounter in a lifetime of teetering on the playground—or to shift metaphors, fewer wrecks along the highway— of a satisfying relationship. May we discover that true love lives in the wisdom of our hearts. Heart and wisdom are acquired in the school of hard love knocks. As we wake up to the inherited, self-defeating games we’ve been playing, we awaken the possibility of loving ourselves and each other unconditionally. And patience and compassion for the unfolding!

PROLOGUE:

L O V E R S

Lovers… are very special people, sings Barbra Streisand. They’re the luckiest people in the world… Thus goes Merrill and Styne’s hit song written back in 1964. Most people would enviously agree, although there are among us a few cynics who are convinced that being in love is a pain in the you-know-where.

  What is it exactly that makes lovers so special? What is it that a lover exudes that tells us that he or she is in fact a lover? What are those qualities that separate people in love from everyone else? That something that defines a lover is the passion, sensitivity, juiciness, electromagnetic exuberance, magic and power of loving and feeling loved. The prototypical Lover is any man or woman pierced by Cupid’s arrow, or teased by the Love Goddess Venus/Aphrodite of Roman/Greek legends. From pale blush to exquisite pique and pining away, the range of response is enormous. Whether she’s driving you mad, or he’s making you act like a silly schoolgirl again, you know when you’ve been taken over by the seductive power of sensual, sexual love. Romance, intrigue and passion is in the air.

  Of course, not all lovers are particularly romantic. Nor do they burn with the same intensity or heat. The spectrum is enormous, from cool to warming, slow burn to red hot lust. And there are degrees of possibility at each place on the spectrum –particular colors, shades and hues, certain textures and shapes uniquely discovered by each person who adventures into the fields of the Lover. In our imagination, we may picture a fully realized archetypal Lover at the center of a love see-saw, having the complete range of motion and emotion. The mature, awakened archetype has available all the musical possibilities, all the exquisite colors and feelings we could dream up. And as we imagine, so we experience the infinite possibilities of loving and being loved.

  True lovers are blessed: They are aware of Life as sacred. Everything has special meaning for them, whether walking hand-in-hand or resting in the blissful tranquility of a sunset. Or making love, coming alive all over in bodily places they never knew existed before. Opening to contain the flood of pleasurable sensations coming over them, Lovers feel that life is inherently purposeful. All their senses are new: The sky is bluer, clouds send special hidden meanings, work is more promising, talents more obvious, skin surfaces more tingly alive to the wind. All five million sense receptors seem to awaken at once. Everything tastes better. Laughter is richer and fuller. Sexual lovemaking is, in the wake of the lovers’ devotion, indescribable, beyond words. 

  Lovers are the anointed ones among us. They are alive and alove all over, with all senses go. The world looks more inviting, more exciting, more beautiful. There’s more celestial music, especially the sound of our