do not call list

I've never been very good at games.

The type at which I excel fall into a couple of limited ranges. I'm great with games of factual recall, trivia games where all I have to do is unfailingly come up with the correct answer. Similarly, I'm good at games where all I have to do is consistently demonstrate some preternaturally charming and precocious skill -- parlor games like charades that require one to engage in creative thinking and mimicry, to act things out to the delight and amusement of others.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'm competitive. Anyone who's played me in Trivial Pursuit can attest to that. But I suffer from a complete lack of strategic skill. When all I need to do is come up with the right answers time after time or to keep acting things out to the best of my ability, I flourish; when I need to choose between any number of options in order to dupe, outsmart, or deceive my opponent, I'm hopeless. I've never been very good at athletic contests for this reason (which, I would contend, trumps even my relatively unexceptional level of physical development). I'm no good figuring out when I should be on defense and when on offense, who I should kick the ball to, when's the right time to go "in for the kill." Tennis has always seemed more like an excuse to bat a ball back and forth than a system for idenifying my opponent's weaknesses and placing the ball in the part of the court that best takes advantage of them. I'm no good at that.

I'm worst at poker. Or any other card game that requires you to mask yourself, to act stealthily, to make wagers on a hand that you know is not strong, and to read your opponent's moves in the hopes of deciphering the reality behind his similarly encoded actions. I am a natural actor but not a natural con-man. Part of the reason is genetic -- I was bequeathed a face with absurdly, almost grotesquely expressive features that inadvertantly register the smallest flicker and variation of my internal mood. My features are so big that they play beyond the back row of the balcony, with a mouth as rubbery as a Kabuki warrior's painted one. And the skill that I've developed in acting classes is transparency, the ability to dredge up feelings and wear them on my sleeve. When I was acting in college and graduate productions, I perfected a type of thin-skinned emotional sensitivity, an art of expressing incredibly clearly the painful pathos beneath the surface. But even on the elementary playground I could impress my friends by making myself cry. I didn't do it by pretending to cry (i.e. fooling them), I just dipped into my well of sadness. I got sad in order to act sad.

All of which leads me to the game I am currently involved in. Right now, as we speak. It's one of those long ongoing games that continues, waking and sleeping, for the duration of play. Like a long-distance chess match conducted by post -- or telegraph or text message or email. Or in my case, conducted by the absence of telegraphs, text messages or emails.

I'm playing hard to get. That is, I'm taking the advice of more strategic friends and, against my natural inclination, refusing to contact someone. (Those up-to-date on recent developments in my personal life will be able to figure out who it is. Needless to say, I'm not quite as detached about the whole thing as I was when I wrote that relationships post a while back.)

I've played hard-to-get before, with quite a bit of success. The New York dating scene (especially, I think, between men) almost requires it for some reason. The hard part is not the not-calling. That's easy enough to go cold turkey -- you just declare that you will not call him, will send no emails, will send no text messages, and that when he calls you will let it go to voicemail without picking up. Easy enough, especially if you have friends monitoring you to make sure you don't fall off the wagon.

The hard part is the mental transformation required. To play effectively, you have to get into the right mindset -- meaning that you have to really be in it for the long haul. You have to internalize the fact that your decision to play hard to get may result in the relationship existing in a state of uncertainty for a good two weeks or so. You can't expect him to notice the fact that you're not calling for at least a few days, probably longer. (Hoping for anything sooner means that you've probably got an unrealistic sense of how big a part you play in his life -- or at least how big a part he wants it to appear you play. See how it gets tricky?)

You know you're in the mindset when friends suggest that you do things with them five days hence and instead of thinking, "Saturday night? But what if _____ calls me and wants to do something? I better keep the evening open," you start thinking, "Perfect! That way when he calls and asks what I'm doing Saturday, I can tell him I've already got plans."

And, yes, as long as there's a little bit of something there to begin with, this strategy is almost certain to inflame his desire eventually. I don't even think you have to worry about the possibility of his meeting someone else, due to the perverse logic that someone who doesn't seem to want you is always more attractive than someone who does.

The unfortuate part is that getting into the mindset seems to inevitably result in spite. You start hating the person. The longer this goes on, the more you start thinking, "Fine! I'll schedule a whole bunch of things so that bastard will feel even worse!" When you inevitably do end up spending time together again, every interaction will have become a mini-competition to prove who's more disinterested. Isn't it unfortunate that the very skills conventionally considered necessary to snag a man (competitiveness, deceit, acting in one's own self-interest) are the opposite of the ones needed to sustain a healthy relationship in the long term?

Moreover, the more time you spend not calling him and filling your appointment book with other pursuits and interests, the more you realize how unimportant he really is. You start to feel that peculiar form of loneliness known as autonomy, which is both heart-breaking and empowering and probably makes you a healthier person. It may have the unintentional side effect of making you totally bored with the guy and no longer feeling that he's the center of your universe, which is probably healthier, too, but doesn't do much for romance.

Of course the stupidest thing one could do when playing hard-to-get is writing a big, long, self-analytical post about it on one's blog. But I guess I'm going to take that risk. You see? I can't supress my innermost feelings -- they just pour out of me! The entirety of this blog attests to that.

Maybe what I really should do is drop the whole game paradigm and think about it as a science experiment. I'm not trying to "gain the upper hand" or anything like that. I'll drop all the competitiveness. Instead, I'm trying to resolve some doubts. I want to figure out if ____ really is inclined pro-actively to include me in his life. When I call him, I can never know if he would have sought out my company of his own accord. By not contacting him, I'm simply controlling one of the variables in hopes of determining the truth of the situation. That's a much less dramatic way of thinking of it.

But I've never been good at science either.