Love Potion

Playing games or applying deceptive surface-strategy to acquire and maintain relationships, especially romantic ones, is like using a love potion.

You never get to stop, but at some point you'll want to.

At some point, it won't be enough. The knowing that it isn't really YOU they're in love with looms larger and larger by the minute.

The good news about playing games is that your ability to play a game and apply a strategy means you have mastered your reactivity in some crucial ways. I like to say that emotional bypass is a superpower, when we weild it correctly.

If you can play it cool while you hide your deepest truths, you can also authentically BE cool as you reveal your deepest truths.

You can offer your truths in palatable ways, as part of your authentic expression, rather than faking palatability by hiding your authentic truth.

The boundary is where connection happens, it's out there at the surface. We always need good surface strategies, the same way we're always wearing some kind of outfit to interface with the world (including nudity).

The key is to know *in yourself* that your surface strategies artfully represent the depths of your identity and truth, that your resonant connections have access to your depths from your surface, where the relationship is possible.

In yourself, you know if your surface strategies are actually concealing the depths of your identity and truth. It's not a crime, it's a phase we all enter, and some of us pass through. It's unsustainable in that it will not sustain, the relationships resulting from this strategy will not sustain.

You can go your whole life, swinging from one unsustainable thing to the next. It's your sovereign right to choose your experience.

AND

Sustainable relationships are available. You have most of what you need already. You're the one who has to decide you deserve that, and claim it for yourself through training the techniques and skills.