What poker can teach us about relationships
There is a particular kind of regret that shows up, again and again, in the offices of lawyers and in the quiet conversations of grown children. It does not sound like disaster. It sounds like leftovers. “I was going to visit more, once work slowed down.” “We always meant to take that trip.” “I figured there would be time to fix things with my brother.” Nobody in these stories hated anybody. Nobody chose the loss. They simply played a game that was for keeps as though it were for fun — and one day they looked down, and the marbles were gone.
In the schoolyard, the difference between the two games was announced before the first shot. Playing for fun meant every marble returned to its owner at the end; nothing was really at stake, so a loose, careless shot cost nothing. Playing for keeps meant what you lost was lost. The tragedy in family life is that nobody announces which game we are in. We find out at the end.
So we treat marriage as something to try, and to abandon if it gets hard — as though a covenant were a subscription that can be cancelled when the content gets dull. We give our children whatever time is left over after work, which is to say we give the best hours of the day, and the best years of our strength, to people who will replace us in a month, and we give the crumbs to the people who will remember us forever. We assume there will always be another chance to repair a relationship, to visit a parent, to say the thing that needs to be said. We play loose, careless shots, never quite believing the marbles are really on the line.
I spent a long career as an attorney watching families at their best and at their worst, and I will be honest that I have seen this pattern at my own table as well as in my office. The pattern is never cruelty. It is drift. A marriage does not usually end in an explosion; it cools, season by season, while both people are busy being reasonable about everything except the marriage. A father’s relationship with his son is not lost in a single argument; it thins across a hundred evenings when work ran late and the boy stopped waiting up. An aging mother does not announce that the window is closing. She just keeps saying she understands that everyone is busy, and she says it a little more quietly each year.
The for-fun mindset survives because its costs are delayed. Skip the visit, and nothing bad happens this week. Postpone the hard conversation, and the evening is actually more pleasant. Give the children the leftover hour, and they adapt, the way children do. The bill for a for-keeps game played carelessly does not arrive until the game is over — the parent gone, the children grown and distant in the polite way of adults who learned not to ask, the spouse become a roommate. By then the marbles cannot be won back, because for-keeps was the rule all along. We just never said it out loud.
But here is the hope inside the warning: the game is usually still in progress. The parent is still living. The spouse is still at the table. The child is still, tonight, under your roof or a phone call away. The man who has been playing his marriage for fun can start playing it for keeps this evening, and the change is visible at once — in the phone set down, the question asked and actually listened to, the apology made first. For-keeps is not a personality some people are born with. It is a decision a person makes about how a shot will be lined up.
So here is the takeaway, and it is deliberately small. This week, take one thing you have been treating as a for-fun game and give it for-keeps treatment. Not a grand gesture — a real one. Make the visit you have been postponing, and put it on the calendar like a court date. Give your children the first hour of your evening instead of the last. Say the sentence to your spouse that you keep assuming there will be time for later. Later is the for-fun player’s favorite word, and it is a bluff. The circle is drawn and the marbles are in the ring. Play this one like it counts, because it does.
