There are a lot of great things about the modern dating world. We’ve cleaned up the messiness of dating. We now have tools that will spit out dates for us at will. While that seems inhumane, it isn’t.  It doesn’t matter how two people come together.

The biggest thing we have now is more choice. Lack of choice in love can be awful. People settle with people they shouldn’t.  People get beaten down by a lack of choice and sometimes give up altogether.  When I say People use it with the generality that we all know is the death to all art.

With all this choice comes  little seizures of heartbreak and loss but spares us the life altering heart attack. We don’t have to learn or alter our idea of ourselves. So we grow in a circle and become insular and seek out more specifically some who can fit the bubble we’ve put ourselves in.  How can we know a person is right for us. The next one might be better. On and on the recycling goes. We trade up like we are trying to hustle a paper clip into a home. Taking out mortgages we can’t afford. Breaking up with a fuck buddy, or moving her to wednesdays because theres a hotter fuck buddy in play.

The game is one we shouldn’t be afraid to play. Part of the game is to get your heart broken, to break hearts, and hopefully still maintain your humanity. I imagine before this amount of choice, love was more like war with binary negotiations.

We aren’t perfect for each other but give me this and we’ll be fine.

Broken hearts were scars that could be seen from space. But now, the incisions are so tiny, so insignificant, but we shouldn’t forget they are there. If you are going to date, if you want to be with someone you should take the time to find the right person. However, at some point playing the game so well that it becomes easy is the moment in which you’ve lost the point of it entirely. So if you are out there and you are with someone who isn’t quite perfect, the click isn’t quite bang, do yourself a favor and tell them you love them… erryday. Because one day you will most likely be making that incision. And when you learn that nothings perfect, no one is without flaw, and no one person has EVER been everything to one other person, it’s going to hurt you quite a bit more than it hurts them.

In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s).

So the game will always feel like it meant more to you than it did to them. But we should remember that we are all in this together.