the Game

I was talking to a friend of mine last night, who happens to be an ex-of-sorts of mine, who had just been out on a date with a girl he's really into (yes I ended a sentence with a preposition). He gets back from what I would call an extremely successful date with her, where they talked all night long about meaningful things. And the poor guy can't even be happy about it because he's so convinced he's gonna fuck it up. He's so scared, and it made me rethink all the awful things I've thought about men/people in the past.

He's probably not a representative sample, he's quite brilliant and sensitive, but he started talking about 'the game'. He said, "she's really smart, smarter than me, and she just knows how to play it. Like you did"

So why do we play games? I was thinking about something I saw on Six Feet Under last night, where Ruth reminds Claire that the basis of intimacy is truth. Truth. So all the hiding, all the masking, all the pretending and planning that is involved in playing games must be designed - whether consciously or not - to avoid the truth. Because truth leads to real intimacy.

And then I had an epiphany, I realized what I and I think many other people are so afraid of about intimacy, and the truth. Maybe I'm just channeling my own experience right now, but part of what I've been struggling with so much with not talking to Hervé is this inexplicably dreaded fact. Fact - as in truth.

That maybe I need him. Maybe sometimes people need each other. We're supposed to be self-sufficient and independent and healthy and be able to figure it all out on our own. But maybe, really, that shouldn't be the ideal. Why is struggling and being alone better than admitting and surrendering to needing someone? Why is that so much more admired and why do we shame ourselves for not just wanting but requiring someone else's help. Man hasn't been a lone, nomadic hunter-gatherer for hundreds of thousands of years, even homo erectus traveled in groups.

Some people are great at being alone. There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, and years of psychotherapy tell me that only the self-sufficient are healthy. But then why the fuck does everyone have a psychotherapist in the first place? Maybe not everyone needs intimacy in their lives, but something tells me that if everyone had it - whether that be with a parent, a friend, a sibling, a lover, a child, a pet, a fucking houseplant WHATEVER - maybe it would solve a lot of things.
Maybe that's why you see people on the street talking to themselves. They've got to tell the truth to someone.

I don't blame my friend for being scared. He's carrying around a lot of darkness with him and he's afraid to show it to anyone, especially someone who's opinion he lives and breathes by. That's a weighty fear, a worthy fear, maybe not justified, but one I can understand on a deep level. Its hard to share that truth with someone, you're afraid they will turn away, or be disgusted, or think you are disturbed. But I've watched my father struggle through his life, unable to have emotional intimacy with anyone, and he's become so alienated from his own feelings that sometimes I feel like he's drowning right before my eyes and I don't know how to save him. I'm not around to reach out to him all the time. The truth is, I don't know that it isn't too late to save him. I'm not sure he would know the truth inside himself, even if he went digging for it. Shouldn't that be what we're REALLY afraid of? Instead of being afraid of sharing with each other? Of needing each other?

Sorry to get so profound on you at 8:30 in the morning, but I've been tossing and turning all night, thinking about this.