There are some marriage games that you just shouldn’t play. Actually, that should probably be amended to there are no marriage games you should play. That kind of petty gaming is going to get you nowhere in your relationship, except maybe broken up, and if that’s the goal, there are easier ways to do it.
Now, obviously the kinds of marriage games we’re talking about here are the emotional kind. No one’s marriage has ever been devastated by Yahtzee, to the best of my knowledge. Maybe if one of the spouses is really competitive.
The kinds of games we’re talking about here are the games we play with emotions. The things that we do to make the other person feel bad, or to make ourselves feel a little better. These kinds of games are all too common, but the thing you have to realize is that with these kinds of marriage games there is no winner.
The impulse to play games is understandable. You feel like you aren’t getting proper respect, or you’re just feeling hurt and left out in the cold. When your husband or wife is doing this kind of thing to you, it’s all too easy to start feeling like you want some payback. So we play games, trying to get some sliver of satisfaction, or may just teach the other person a lesson.
Truth is! they are never going to learn that lesson. Marriage games never, ever make things any better. While you might get some kind of brief malicious joy out of the gamesmanship, you’re sacrificing your marriage to do so.
What marriage games do succeed at doing is distracting both of you from the things you need to be looking at to save your marriage. You will be caught in a nasty spiral of one upping your partner, and hurt feelings are just going to get worse and worse.
This spiral can ultimately lead to divorce, and the best case scenario is that one of you drops and you’re left with just a lot of hard feeling. Regardless, nothing good is going to come from this sort of behavior, and the pain will outweigh any pleasure you get from it.
What you should be doing, instead of playing these silly marriage games, is looking at what is going wrong in your relationship so that you can begin doing the work necessary to fix it. The work is what you need to be focusing on, not just gamesmanship. Not getting payback; just a focus on making things better.
This will be a matter of putting aside the hurt feelings and the bad behavior and asking you the difficult questions. You need to get to the heart of what is troubling your marriage, and the only way to do this is through open and honest communication with your partner.
That kind of honesty is going to be harder than playing marriage games, but it’s also going to be more rewarding. Fortunately, there are any number of systems and guides available to show you how to get out to game playing trap and repair your relationship.