🐈

For intimate relationships the game is usually child rearing. "I want to play an at-least 2 decade long game with you." "Wow, you really like me that much huh?"

There are other games, but they can often be short term. E.g. marriage for "only have sex w/ me and I'll support your life style" only lasts as long as the sex appeal does.

Marriages that are built around owning each other create weak communities because the base link revolves around something with a limited shelf life. Loneliness, like entropy, is the natural state of things.

Without creating an external witness that binds a pair to something outside their internal realities, the drift in their world views eventually becomes a betrayal/revelation shock that can shatter the relationship.

The magnitude of these shocks is in proportion to how much drift has accumulated due to lack of synchronization. Regular sex for example keeps couples together because it's easy to tell when something is "off" and try to fix it. (or make it worse, results vary)

There's a certain state that some people reach where this existential loneliness is accepted. This situation is common in Haruki Murakami novels where characters just start having sex unexpectedly.

It's why spiritual gurus can be correlated with orgy sex cults. If you can see the same "soul" burning within everyone even across a vast sea of psychic darkness, you can feel a sense of love towards that person.

In summary... I think it's more effective to think about relationships as a series of journeys. To switch too often is like being a tourist, there's value in longer journeys.