Do You Have Genuine Connection or Are You Just Playing with Each Other?
How we can tell the difference
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“Thunder only happens when it’s raining.
Players only love you when they’re playing.”
Fleetwood Mac, Dreams
Casting for the Play
When I heard the lyrics to this song by Fleetwood Mac yesterday, so many relationships started making sense.
We often have an idea of what we want in a relationship ahead of time. Then, we go out into the world to find someone who will play the role. This could be wanting a dominant or submissive personality. They may need to look a certain way. They may need to have a certain kind of job or family. They may need to have certain quirks, fetishes, interests, or they mustn’t have any of them.
We know who we are looking for because it is like we are casting for a play.
When we find the person whom we “love”, we begin to play out our script. If they don’t act a certain way, we give them their lines. If they aren’t putting enough passion into their part, we encourage them to put more into it.
When things don’t go quite the way we hoped, perhaps, we discover that they too have their own script and we have a designated role to play for them as well. They also have lines that they would like us to say. They have actions that they would like us to perform.
And then, perhaps we triple the confusion because both of us are also wanting our coupling to “look good for the crowd”. We want to be superstars.
So, what happens when one person decides they don’t want to play a role in the other’s play? Maybe chaos ensues. A battle of wills — passive or actively aggressive. A jostling of position. Cold shoulders and power plays.
But eventually, one person stops playing, the show ends and we go off to find someone else to be an actor in our play…
What About True Connection Instead?
What if the goal was to just connect with another human being — no games, no power plays, no dance, no casting at all?
What if we just looked at this other person exactly as they are and chose to connect with them? How different…
