I think Mike’s undecided. I say that because so often his post titles and opening paragraphs reflect one point of view and his final paragraph seems to reach the entirely opposite conclusion. He says games have a higher success rate, but just a few paragraphs later questions how pretending to be something you’re not can end in anything but disaster. I think his final conclusion is the right one, but I think the perception that feeds his headline is one of the reasons we’re stuck with so many games and so much manipulation in the dating world.
That’s because it’s hard to judge the health of another person’s relationships, or to know whether one or both people are really happy in the relationship. The perception of “success” is, instead, numbers driven. We don’t know whether a guy is enjoying his dates, whether his relationships are solid, whether the women in question go home and tell their friends that they’ve had the best three weeks of their lives or the worst…we only know how many women respond to him in the bar, in an online forum, on a dating site. We only know whether or not they go home with him. And those numbers, I think, do lie–at least, as a measure of the kind of “success” Mike is talking about.
Because “success” really only exists as a measure of having reached your own goals, of having accomplished what you set out to do. And if your goal is a long-term relationship, the guy who is racking up a series of one-night stands hasn’t really succeeded by your standards. He may be a success with regard to his own goals, but that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. A guy who’s looking for a serious relationship checking out the game players and saying “they seem to get a lot of short-term, superficial relationships–think I’ll try what they’re doing” makes as much sense as someone looking for a pedigreed poodle saying “Hey, my neighbor has a really nice muscle car–I’ll ask where he got it and check there.”
