The games people play

Before the age of match.com, when dating was still novel and I hadn't heard every line in the book, I loved to read newspaper personal ads. Often cheesy, sometimes creepy, I felt like they gave a shorthand look into the world of dating, a sort of cryptic road map to help navigate the as-yet-uncharted realm of male-female engagements.

Among the many variations of SM's seeking SF's, there was one line that consistently caught my eye: "No games." It appeared so frequently that I came to understand early on, when I had barely gotten my own dating feet wet, that game-playing must factor into most relationships.

When I learned that this year's Alliance of the Arts fundraiser, Art Royale, was themed "The Games People Play," I immediately had a flash on those personal ads from the past and chuckled to myself. It seems game-playing is still in vogue.

For the event, my friend Susie and I donned costumes (she, an all-noir, über-artsy Magic 8 Ball; me, the Queen of Hearts) and mingled with the Fort Myers art scene. As we sampled tuna tataki from Crü and pomegranate martinis at the bar, we scanned the crowd, on the lookout for eligible bachelors.

Friends since high school, Susie and my dating records have often run parallel, with more time spent as single women than with significant others. The most notable exception came in our early twenties, when our first taste of love had a decidedly European flavor.

For Susie, it was a British engineer, attractive and endearing, with a sense of humor and English accent that made him utterly swoonworthy. My tastes ran more continental, and I gave my heart to a boy from the south of France that played the guitar and had the green-browngold eyes of a sun-drenched vineyard. He spoke a languid, lyrical French, inflected with the intonations of Provence, and merely the way he said my name ruined me on American men for many years afterward.

Art Royale, though a good time, was bereft in the dating department, and Susie and I left without so much as a prospect on our social agendas. Still, the theme of the night stuck with us, and we found ourselves rehashing our first relationships and how little we knew then about the game of love.

Young and new to the dating market, we were artifice free. We didn't strategize or scheme, plot or connive. We were helplessly, hopelessly in love, and we took the maxim, "no games," to heart.

"We were disastrous!" Susie said.

I laughed with her, and we both cringed as we remembered how we returned calls immediately and made ourselves shamelessly available. It was a long, painful lesson for each of us and ultimately ended in heartache on both our parts.

Now, years later, we have taken the lessons learned from those first, artless relationships and turned them into tools in our dating skill set. We are not masters of the game, per se, but we are diligent protégés.

When Susie's first love sent her flowers for this year's birthday, an unimaginable act of generosity in our gamefree days, she was carefully insouciant in her response. And, when my French love tracked me down on Facebook this week - four years since the last time we spoke - I sent a circumspectly indifferent reply, 48 hours after his initial message.

In a perfect world, none of us would play games and relationships would be as seamless and uncomplicated as our sentiments. Until there is a universal détente, however, my player days are far from over.

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