Men typically enjoy playing games, whether video games or sports or a battle of wits or just made-up games.  We enjoy the competition and the challenge.  Women, in general, seem to want the games to be “fair” to the point that no one has an advantage and no one loses.

But a strange thing happens when a man and a woman are married: the guy usually ends up playing a game he didn’t know he was playing.  In this marriage game, the woman makes the rules (and these rules are subject to change all the time), and the guy doesn’t know the rules.  So there’s not really any competition, just losing.  And perhaps the woman still wants everyone to win, but it’s ironically not setup fairly, and the guy loses a lot because he doesn’t know how to play (if he even knows he’s playing a game).

So in marriage, the woman wants to make it a game, but not fair.  The guy doesn’t want it to be a game, but he’s forced into it anyway.  So I’m wondering — when did things get all mixed up?

Do you want an example of these games?  Here’s one: the husband does something extra to help his wife out around the house.  To a guy, if he volunteers to help out with something, to be nice and make her happy, that’s a good thing.  But just offering to help and then helping isn’t enough.  He may be judged in the following categories: what he’s offering to help on compared with other tasks, if he really wants to do this or not, and how excited he is about doing this.  And so in trying to do good, he may be penalized because of the other aspects, and then it counts as a negative on his score.  So he may end up confused, frustrated, and less motivated to offer extra help next time.  Thus everyone loses…