Gay Dating Advice: Is Backing up from a Guy You like Playing Games?

I had lunch with an acquaintance who’s going out with one of my best friends. A best friend who’s not that into my acquaintance. Oh he likes him fine, and they do a lot together but it’s clear that the acquaintance is falling in love and my best friend is not.

As we sat there over our chicken caesar salad I tried to hint to him that his best course of action is to backup and give my bff some space. “Look,” I said.  “when two people come at each other and one is running a lot faster than the other one is there’s going to be a crash. The faster one is going to flatten the slower one. The job of the person who’s going faster is to slow down and mirror the slower one.”

“But isn’t that playing games,” he asked.” Any time somebody has to pretend that they’re not as interested in the other guy is playing a game.”

Is that true? I don’t think so. Slowing down when the other guy is clearly not as into you isn’t playing a game: it’s honoring where that person is.   It’s understanding that the other person has not had the number or kind of experiences he needs to see you fully.

Time, distance, and space give him the opportunity to work things out in his head about his feelings and it activates the age-old quote, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Playing games is an attempt at manipulation.  But is listening to the other person and giving them what they need playing a game?   I don’t think so. All of us have been in a situation where we’ve dated people we weren’t that into. The more that person pushed the more we backed away. But when that person backed up and created space we experienced a natural phenomenon: nature abhors a vacuum. When one is created you will either step into it and create more closeness or you will back out of it and break the vacuum.

Giving somebody space to figure out whether they want to fill the vacuum or break it isn’t playing games.  It’s gift-giving, to them and to yourself.

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