From a book I'm reading...
"Philosopher George Hebert Mead memorably employed the game metaphor to understand how children take the roles of others. Perhaps the most explicit metaphor of social life as a game is Norton Long's "Community as an Ecology of Games." Long argues that community life can be seen as a set of intersecting social worlds. In each social world, participants struggle for strategic and tactical advantage. As in more artificial games, success is measurable, as players are able to tell the score. Memorably, sociologist Erving Goffman argued that social life could be understood as a form of "strategic interaction."...in that human activity, for Goffman, is strategic, contingent upon the responses of others, and is unscripted."
Is this true? Is love strategic? Do we struggle for tactical advantage in community?
From another book I read over Christmas break...
"I need other presences, and I will do almost anything to acquire them. I have to learn, however, that the support and love I crave can come to me only as a gift. Love is a gift or it is nothing. Insofar as we are able to reject strategies of possessiveness and manipulation, the conditions are already being set for the development of real soul making, of real loving."
The word that always gets me in this quote- the one that scalds my heart with each reading- is the word manipulation. I had an conversation with a friend just the other day about “girl manipulation” in relationship. The more I am honest with myself, I wonder sometimes how much of my love is honest, and how much is manipulation for something that I want. Is this, therefore, part of the “game?” Am I trying to win?
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