Lately, everywhere I look, I’m being told how love is supposed to work. How to be a black cat. How to get a man in five steps. How to lose a guy. How not to lose a guy. Wait three days. Don’t text first. Act distant. Feel less, win more… Our feeds are flooded with rules, formulas, and emotional chess moves. And while our minds feel almost poisoned by all these strategies, one question keeps quietly forming in the back of mine: can love — something so raw, so exposed, so deeply human — really be a game?
The Case Of Carrie And Mr. Big
Watching Sex and the City again, I’m amazed by how it perfectly reflects the idea of love as a game. Carrie is a free spirit — the kind of woman who proudly believes that some women are, as she once put it, untameable. But when it comes to Mr. Big, that freedom quietly disappears.
Near him, Carrie becomes more careful, more easy-going, more edited. Instead of expressing her needs openly, she stays silent for too long, until her feelings erupt as anger. Carrie isn’t being authentic; she’s being tactical in a performative relationship. In trying not to lose Mr. Big, she slowly stops being herself.
And the tragedy is that the game was unwinnable from the start. Carrie believes that if she adapts enough, softens enough, gives Mr. Big exactly what he wants, he will finally choose her. But Mr. Big is never truly satisfied; not because Carrie fails to please him, but because he was never looking to be fulfilled by her presence alone.
What exists between them is not a secure bond, but a dependency: Carrie locked in the hysterical position, constantly performing for love, and Mr. Big in the obsessive position, wanting without fully committing. In psychoanalytic terms, it isn’t intimacy that keeps them together, but repetition — mistaking attachment for love.
Why Tactics Seem To Work?
Tactics seem to work because they offer an illusion of control. They force you to find safety in uncertainty, offer protection from rejection, and promise distance from vulnerability. By following rules, such as when to text, how much to reveal, how long to wait, we believe we can control desire without being vulnerable.
And for a while, tactics can create attraction.
What they cannot create is connection.
The Real Matter: Tactics Vs Boundaries
Strategy tries to control the outcome. Boundaries protect the self.
Strategy is approval-seeking and asks:
“What should I do to make them stay?”
Boundaries are self-awareness and ask a different question:
“What do I need to feel safe and loved?”
When we rely on strategy, we adjust our behavior to control another person’s reactions. When we have boundaries, we don’t manage — we decide. We don’t calculate how much to reveal; we notice how we feel and act accordingly.
Carrie and Natasha show this difference clearly. After Mr. Big cheated on Natasha, he never truly had access to her ever again. She drew a line and meant it. Yet with Carrie, there were always second chances, explanations, unfinished conversations. Their situationship stretched on for whole six years.
Boundaries aren’t about pushing people away, but about staying connected to ourselves.
And the truth is, genuine love doesn’t require strategy — it responds to clarity and honesty.
A Final Word
Carl Jung once said:
“No matter how well you master strategy, remember that the moment you touch another person, you are touching a human being.”
Maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t know the rules well enough.
Maybe it’s that somewhere along the way, we forgot we were human — and so was the person sitting across from us.
Thus, everything we’ve been exposed to on our feeds is simply “fake” and far from genuine. True authenticity cannot coexist with manipulation. True love cannot coexist with fear.