From the article archive
Get Real: Love and Gaming
Love and Gaming
Organizing your time for personal and gaming life can be quite a chore. If you're already happily (there's the magic word!) involved with or married to someone, you probably don't need this article. On the other hand, many of us are, once were, or hope to be in the position of *successfully* juggling our real-life romantic relationships and our gaming sessions. How do we do it?
At least three strategies exist:
1) Negotiate gaming time into your schedule.
2) Find a significant other (hereafter “SO,” referring to girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, sexpuppet, or whatever turns your crank) who games.
3) Make sure your SO has his or her own hobbies.
Disclaimer: I’m not a professional relationship counselor, and most of this article is carefully considered personal and second hand anecdotal information. Use it at your own risk. If you walk away with one thought from this article, remember that many things go into a relationship, including age differences, maturity level, relative authority levels, mutual interests, and physical attraction, to name a few. The real bottom line is that a relationship must always take priority over gaming. Until you come to this realization, no juggling strategy will work to the happiness of both partners.
Please Please Me
Everything in a relationship is give-and-take, and in every relationship, one person does more giving than taking in any particular situation. "Let me go gaming tonight, and we can go out for dinner this weekend." Or how about, "I get this weekly game, and we [insert SO’s preferred activity] together once a week.” Sound familiar? The unspoken reality is that there are only so many hours in a week, and if you want to game more, you’ll have to sacrifice some other interest of yours to spend time with your SO, even if it’s just sitting on your butt in front of the tube.
Negotiation is probably the most frequently approached and commonly conceived solution to game scheduling woes between couples. As an alternative, some folks might use mutually exclusive private time. “I’m busy at such-and-so time every week, so if you want to game, game then.”
Whether it works or not, I contend negotiation is the most timeworn, threadbare, and dull solution. Relationships aren't solely intended to be negotiations. Your spouse isn't supposed to unilaterally give you up once or twice a week, nor are you supposed to make “sacrifices” for them. As intelligent human beings, it's our responsibility to learn what real-life events help us grow and improve in the real world, not just our fantasy environs. If “date night” becomes a chore, it’s time to reassess your priorities.
If you know a social outing is important to your SO, it's non-negotiable. Don't ask, don't argue, and above all, don’t “sacrifice” your gaming for your SO’s interest. Realize it’s at least as important to your SO as gaming is to you, and try it with an open heart. Even if you skip the game to go to your SO's event, and you both end up being miserable there, at least you can both commiserate about it together at the end of the day. (You do enjoy talking to your SO, don't you?) He or she won't be doubly miserable for lack of your company AND having to suffer through a terrible event. And, you can be sure you'll never have to suffer through such a thing again, now that you BOTH know what it's like.
The game just isn't as important as real life, no matter what the game scenario is. You'd be surprised how many gamers actually understand the importance of your SO to you. They might even reschedule the session for you.
Sure, that seems common sense to those of us firmly rooted in reality and our relationships, but when I was younger and sans relationship, you'd have had a tough time convincing me that the game I was in was less important than reality. I usually didn't have as much fun in reality as I did in the game. Being a touch hedonistic at the time, the importance of the game outweighed everything except, on occasion, a fresh-baked, semi-gooey chocolate-chip cookie.
Gamer vs Gamer
Your partner games, hmm? Perhaps you met them at one of the games you play. Perhaps it was just a chance meeting in a coffeehouse, a bar, or a library. Lucky you! Potentially, you always have a gaming buddy to hang with, talk to, and get creative with.
But, having your SO be a gamer can also bring up other problems. If you GM a game in which your SO plays, subdued murmurs of GM favoritism may rumble from your other players. There have been plenty of articles on how to resolve those situations, so I won’t cover them here.
If you play the same games (especially boardgames), you and your SO may occasionally gang up on the other players -- but to them it may feel as if it happens all the time.
Directly antagonizing your SO in a game is also a very real possibility. For some people, this isn't a problem, but others really hate to seem as if they're "going after" their SO as they would any other player -- even in fun. So they'll make subtle moves that give the advantage to their partners, or avoid interacting with their partners unless absolutely necessary.
My personal solution? I choose a member of someone else's couple to be MY gaming buddy (overtly or covertly), and thoroughly trounce their real-life partner. Immense fun, even if I lose the game. I'm consoled and justified by the fact that I know it often happens to me. It happens even if I play even-handedly, so I resort to this tactic quite often in the endgame situation. At the very least, if I can't win, I can maintain the competitive nature of the game by offsetting the person who's ganging up with my partner against me.
What I Am (is what I am)
Successful, healthy relationships are built on two-way interactions. Successful, healthy people are also complete in and of themselves.
For some of us, gaming is cathartic. Your chosen partner, if chosen wisely, will know and understand that. After all, don't they have stress-relieving hobbies of their own?
If your SO's hobby is you, trust me: you’re in trouble. And if they want to be your only hobby, watch out! It’s nice to be wanted. I suspect it’s a bit of a nightmare to be needed all the time. People like that need therapy. If you enjoy that sort of single-minded adoration day in and day out, I suspect you do as well.
Gaming isn’t the only hobby out there. Many of us watch television, movies, maintain pets, tinker with cars, study history, etc. There’s needlecrafts, paper crafts, fitness sports, sightseeing, wine tasting, and many other activities that your SO might pick up. Be sure your SO does something besides stare vapidly at the wall when you’re not around.
You probably hooked up with your SO because one or more of your hobbies meshed in some way – at the very least, you enjoyed hearing about your SO’s excursions, and your SO enjoyed hearing about yours (or simply tolerated it well). You may not be able to get your SO to game with you, but maybe he or she will go to the Renaissance Faire with you, attend a LARP, hold a murder mystery dinner, attend a creative writing class, help you think up new character concepts, or act as a sounding board for adventure ideas. Of course, you need to reciprocate with respect to your SO’s diversions as well.
Relationship growth occurs as each of you grows as an individual, and each of you takes the time to learn how the other has grown. Take advantage of your time together to do this, and possibly even to find ways to link your hobbies together. Your SO might knit you a dice bag or forge a real knife for one of your characters, and you might impart some of your gaming-inspired creativity or interpersonal psychology to challenging real-life problems your SO might have at the office.
Old Dogs and New Tricks
A number of factors will influence your ability to apply one or more of these strategies in a relationship. Your relationship may be new, and therefore will likely require more maintenance than a solidly established relationship. Your SO may be naturally “high maintenance. Never approach or maintain any relationship with the mindset that the other person will change to suit your needs. If you love your SO, you need to accommodate them. It’s that simple. And that works both ways, i.e., even the high maintenance SO needs to give you your private (gaming) time.
I highly recommend against taking any of these strategies and “experimenting” on your SO. If you should ever have problems, address options openly. Most healthy relationships are peer relationships, and best maintained as such. Underhanded (or even well-meant) manipulation leads to bad things.
You shouldn’t have to give up gaming to have a good relationship, and you certainly shouldn’t have to give up a good relationship to be able to play the games you love. The old adage that trust is the cornerstone of a relationship is true, but rarely do we see functional techniques for creating and maintaining trust elaborated on. This article expounds on three possibilities: negotiation, shared gaming interest, and interrelated hobbying. I hope these ideas help, or at least stimulate other ideas that are eventually helpful to you in managing your relationship and your gaming needs.
Merwin
SureReal Network
www.surereal.net
Organizing your time for personal and gaming life can be quite a chore. If you're already happily (there's the magic word!) involved with or married to someone, you probably don't need this article. On the other hand, many of us are, once were, or hope to be in the position of *successfully* juggling our real-life romantic relationships and our gaming sessions. How do we do it?
At least three strategies exist:
1) Negotiate gaming time into your schedule.
2) Find a significant other (hereafter “SO,” referring to girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, sexpuppet, or whatever turns your crank) who games.
3) Make sure your SO has his or her own hobbies.
Disclaimer: I’m not a professional relationship counselor, and most of this article is carefully considered personal and second hand anecdotal information. Use it at your own risk. If you walk away with one thought from this article, remember that many things go into a relationship, including age differences, maturity level, relative authority levels, mutual interests, and physical attraction, to name a few. The real bottom line is that a relationship must always take priority over gaming. Until you come to this realization, no juggling strategy will work to the happiness of both partners.
Please Please Me
Everything in a relationship is give-and-take, and in every relationship, one person does more giving than taking in any particular situation. "Let me go gaming tonight, and we can go out for dinner this weekend." Or how about, "I get this weekly game, and we [insert SO’s preferred activity] together once a week.” Sound familiar? The unspoken reality is that there are only so many hours in a week, and if you want to game more, you’ll have to sacrifice some other interest of yours to spend time with your SO, even if it’s just sitting on your butt in front of the tube.
Negotiation is probably the most frequently approached and commonly conceived solution to game scheduling woes between couples. As an alternative, some folks might use mutually exclusive private time. “I’m busy at such-and-so time every week, so if you want to game, game then.”
Whether it works or not, I contend negotiation is the most timeworn, threadbare, and dull solution. Relationships aren't solely intended to be negotiations. Your spouse isn't supposed to unilaterally give you up once or twice a week, nor are you supposed to make “sacrifices” for them. As intelligent human beings, it's our responsibility to learn what real-life events help us grow and improve in the real world, not just our fantasy environs. If “date night” becomes a chore, it’s time to reassess your priorities.
If you know a social outing is important to your SO, it's non-negotiable. Don't ask, don't argue, and above all, don’t “sacrifice” your gaming for your SO’s interest. Realize it’s at least as important to your SO as gaming is to you, and try it with an open heart. Even if you skip the game to go to your SO's event, and you both end up being miserable there, at least you can both commiserate about it together at the end of the day. (You do enjoy talking to your SO, don't you?) He or she won't be doubly miserable for lack of your company AND having to suffer through a terrible event. And, you can be sure you'll never have to suffer through such a thing again, now that you BOTH know what it's like.
The game just isn't as important as real life, no matter what the game scenario is. You'd be surprised how many gamers actually understand the importance of your SO to you. They might even reschedule the session for you.
Sure, that seems common sense to those of us firmly rooted in reality and our relationships, but when I was younger and sans relationship, you'd have had a tough time convincing me that the game I was in was less important than reality. I usually didn't have as much fun in reality as I did in the game. Being a touch hedonistic at the time, the importance of the game outweighed everything except, on occasion, a fresh-baked, semi-gooey chocolate-chip cookie.
Gamer vs Gamer
Your partner games, hmm? Perhaps you met them at one of the games you play. Perhaps it was just a chance meeting in a coffeehouse, a bar, or a library. Lucky you! Potentially, you always have a gaming buddy to hang with, talk to, and get creative with.
But, having your SO be a gamer can also bring up other problems. If you GM a game in which your SO plays, subdued murmurs of GM favoritism may rumble from your other players. There have been plenty of articles on how to resolve those situations, so I won’t cover them here.
If you play the same games (especially boardgames), you and your SO may occasionally gang up on the other players -- but to them it may feel as if it happens all the time.
Directly antagonizing your SO in a game is also a very real possibility. For some people, this isn't a problem, but others really hate to seem as if they're "going after" their SO as they would any other player -- even in fun. So they'll make subtle moves that give the advantage to their partners, or avoid interacting with their partners unless absolutely necessary.
My personal solution? I choose a member of someone else's couple to be MY gaming buddy (overtly or covertly), and thoroughly trounce their real-life partner. Immense fun, even if I lose the game. I'm consoled and justified by the fact that I know it often happens to me. It happens even if I play even-handedly, so I resort to this tactic quite often in the endgame situation. At the very least, if I can't win, I can maintain the competitive nature of the game by offsetting the person who's ganging up with my partner against me.
What I Am (is what I am)
Successful, healthy relationships are built on two-way interactions. Successful, healthy people are also complete in and of themselves.
For some of us, gaming is cathartic. Your chosen partner, if chosen wisely, will know and understand that. After all, don't they have stress-relieving hobbies of their own?
If your SO's hobby is you, trust me: you’re in trouble. And if they want to be your only hobby, watch out! It’s nice to be wanted. I suspect it’s a bit of a nightmare to be needed all the time. People like that need therapy. If you enjoy that sort of single-minded adoration day in and day out, I suspect you do as well.
Gaming isn’t the only hobby out there. Many of us watch television, movies, maintain pets, tinker with cars, study history, etc. There’s needlecrafts, paper crafts, fitness sports, sightseeing, wine tasting, and many other activities that your SO might pick up. Be sure your SO does something besides stare vapidly at the wall when you’re not around.
You probably hooked up with your SO because one or more of your hobbies meshed in some way – at the very least, you enjoyed hearing about your SO’s excursions, and your SO enjoyed hearing about yours (or simply tolerated it well). You may not be able to get your SO to game with you, but maybe he or she will go to the Renaissance Faire with you, attend a LARP, hold a murder mystery dinner, attend a creative writing class, help you think up new character concepts, or act as a sounding board for adventure ideas. Of course, you need to reciprocate with respect to your SO’s diversions as well.
Relationship growth occurs as each of you grows as an individual, and each of you takes the time to learn how the other has grown. Take advantage of your time together to do this, and possibly even to find ways to link your hobbies together. Your SO might knit you a dice bag or forge a real knife for one of your characters, and you might impart some of your gaming-inspired creativity or interpersonal psychology to challenging real-life problems your SO might have at the office.
Old Dogs and New Tricks
A number of factors will influence your ability to apply one or more of these strategies in a relationship. Your relationship may be new, and therefore will likely require more maintenance than a solidly established relationship. Your SO may be naturally “high maintenance. Never approach or maintain any relationship with the mindset that the other person will change to suit your needs. If you love your SO, you need to accommodate them. It’s that simple. And that works both ways, i.e., even the high maintenance SO needs to give you your private (gaming) time.
I highly recommend against taking any of these strategies and “experimenting” on your SO. If you should ever have problems, address options openly. Most healthy relationships are peer relationships, and best maintained as such. Underhanded (or even well-meant) manipulation leads to bad things.
You shouldn’t have to give up gaming to have a good relationship, and you certainly shouldn’t have to give up a good relationship to be able to play the games you love. The old adage that trust is the cornerstone of a relationship is true, but rarely do we see functional techniques for creating and maintaining trust elaborated on. This article expounds on three possibilities: negotiation, shared gaming interest, and interrelated hobbying. I hope these ideas help, or at least stimulate other ideas that are eventually helpful to you in managing your relationship and your gaming needs.
Merwin
SureReal Network
www.surereal.net
Recovered from the Gaming Outpost database backup. Original wording is preserved; damaged punctuation and presentation markup have been repaired. Historical links without a local match point to the Internet Archive.