Black Balled: The Dating Game

We are a society obsessed with games. They surround us constantly: think about. You turn on the radio, and what would be the fun of radio without a game or two to wake you up or get you through that 3PM slump? So you escape the monotony of secretary radio and go out to lunch at a chain restaurant, and there’s a variety of sports games on the restaurant’s twenty mounted televisions. Stop for gas, and what do you get held up by? A long line of people waiting patiently to buy their weekly or daily lottery tickets.

And for what? Perhaps it isn’t so much that we are a society that is obsessed with games as are for establishing winners and losers. And the biggest games we play are with each other, particularly the dating game.

I wasn’t immediately aware how fiercely I had been playing. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I realized that the last two dates I had been taken on had opted to take me bowling. The first guy said, “Well, there just isn’t a lot to do here, so everyone goes to the bowling alley on Fridays.” (It was a small college town where the choice was the bowling alley or the local Applebees.) So he decided that taking me to a smoky, run down bowling alley was the way to win me over; along with ordering too many beers and telling me how many Vicoden he had consumed in the last hour. I was a good sport, taking one for the team since my date also happened to be my mother’s co-worker’s brother in-law. I did make a couple of fouls though: I kept stepping over a red line painted on the floor with a lit cigarette, which was apparently a big no-no, as the woman behind the counter continuously rasped over the intercom, “No food or cigarettes beyond the red line.” There are worse things I could have done, and needless to say, I spent the next two weeks ignoring that guy’s phone calls and erasing slurred voicemails.

About a month later, I took another shot. My new date told me, after a quiet dinner, that bowling was all about body language, and that could learn a lot about a person by how they approached the lane. Silly me, I had left my bowling shoes at home and was ill-equipped with a pair of stilettos on. Of course those horrible bowling shoes didn’t exactly compliment my outfit, so trying to strut up to the lane in those shoes with a big heavy ball in my hands, visualizing the pins as ex-boyfriend’s heads, I probably didn’t look like I could approach any situation in life very well. I appreciated his theory behind this game of men (and women) who drank too much beer and needed to shave. I continued to see him….only to play more games.

I would rather think about dating as a pool game. This big wide open space, a few balls, and here we are, taking shots at each one, trying to individually conquer each ball. There we are: getting rid of each ball that we set after, trying to get down to that last crucial one. At the beginning of the game, all of those balls look so pretty all snuggled up together in their rack, only quickly to scatter. And who wins the game? The one who lands that black ball in the pocket….the infamous black ball. God forbid you send that black ball in too early, or you’ve lost the game. After sitting and watching a game between some lonely old men and a new engaged couple as I waited on my current black ball, I had a terrifying thought: what if I had sent my black ball in too early? Had I started stacking up quarters in hopes of a second game that I shouldn’t have been playing in the first place? There’s an entire world of pool players out there who have sent the innocent little black ball down that deep dark tunnel where every balls fears to go. But what if I had lost my means to knock every other ball into it’s cell, what if I didn;’t have very many more shots left? My father was great at playing pool; had even come close to making national championships; why hadn’t I paid more attention when he was telling me the tricks and rules of the game? This world as a pool table is starting to lose it’s good, shiny balls (pun intended and not) as their numbers wear off with every stroke of the pool stick. Even more frightening, there’s a world of pool players that don’t know how to play correctly: a world of pool players who have shot that black ball into the darkness way too many times.

It’s a constant tallying of scores: whether you’re single or in a relationship, or even just a first date. You start getting points or fouls immediately: everything one says or does in the company of another is always being refereed by the referee that lives inside all of us.

My theory was put to the test furthermore when my current black ball and decided to play a game of darts. So there we were, not five feet away from the pool table, trying to make the bulls eye. The game started off great: I was winning…and tallying up points faster than he was. I was the winner, and I had the upper hand. I watched coyly from the side as he continued to hit the one and two point spots on the board. Like everyone else, I found a bit of self gratification in his losing. I had control, and was undoubtedly trying to translate it to our own personal game. Then it all changed without a moment’s notice. He started winning, and I suddenly had a million questions. Had he only let me win in the beginning because he was a gentleman? Had he only let me win because he wanted to show how quickly the game could change?  How quickly he could call foul points on me and tackle me beneath him, my heart a resounding thud as it hit the playing field? My insecurity continued to grow under the whistling of every dart as it raced towards the dartboard that had too many puncture wounds in it already.

Pat Benatar had it right: love is a battlefield, and I shouldn’t have sang “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” so defiantly throughout my life. I was getting what I had asked for.

There’s no escaping it. No matter what anyone says, there is no forfeiting in this game we call love. There are winners. There are losers. There are bench warmers. There are cheerleaders and even coaches. No matter what we’re doing in this game, we have a place among it, and we are all in it for the same reason: to land that black ball in a pocket…no matter how many stacks of quarters there are on the table.

I’m still not willing to make any bets though.

For now, I’ve got the pool stick in my hand, my eye on the eight ball, and I’m aiming for the corner pocket.