What poker can teach us about relationships
Ask a married couple what went wrong, years down the road, and you will rarely hear about one big moment. You will hear about a long season of small ones — the conversations that never happened, the evenings given to everything except each other, the assumption that there would always be time later. Nobody decided to lose. They just never decided what kind of game they were playing. And that turns out to be the first mistake, because it is the one all the others grow out of.
If you grew up in a certain era, you remember the circle. Someone scratched it in the dirt with a stick, or drew it on the sidewalk in chalk, or laid it out with a piece of string on the schoolyard. Each player put a few marbles in the middle. Then you knelt at the edge, knuckles down, your favorite shooter balanced against your thumb, and you tried to knock the other marbles out of the ring.
But before anyone took a shot, there was always the question. Somebody would ask it, usually the kid with the best marbles and the most to lose: Are we playing for fun, or for keeps?
Everyone understood what it meant. If you played for fun, every marble went back to its owner when the game was over. Win or lose, you went home with exactly what you brought. Nothing was really at stake. But if you played for keeps, every marble you knocked out of the circle was yours to keep — and every marble you lost was gone. Your prized cat’s-eye. The steelie your grandfather gave you. The big glass shooter you had carried in your pocket all summer. The game was suddenly real.
Watch what happened to the circle when someone said for keeps. Kids who had been laughing got quiet. They took more care lining up their shots. They thought harder about which marbles to put in the ring. Some of them decided not to play at all. Nothing about the game itself had changed — same dirt, same marbles, same shooter. Only the stakes had been named. And naming them changed how everybody played.
That childhood question is the most important question in a family, because most of life can honestly be played for fun. Jobs change. Houses are bought and sold. Hobbies come and go. Investments rise and fall, and you can usually recover from a bad trade. Even a career, as many of us learn over a long life, can be rebuilt more than once. In all of those games, a careless shot costs you a marble you get back at supper.
But some things are played for keeps. A marriage. A child. The years you spend with your parents before they are gone. The way you raise your children, which they will carry for the rest of their lives and hand down to their own. The trust between two people who have promised each other everything. These are not practice rounds. There is no giving the marbles back at the end. What you win is truly won, and what you lose is truly lost.
The trouble is that nobody stands in the doorway of a marriage or a nursery and asks the question out loud. We drift into the for-keeps games with a for-fun mindset, because the for-fun mindset is our default for everything else. We line up our shots the way we line them up at work, in traffic, in the marketplace — quickly, casually, assuming another round is coming. But a childhood is not coming around again. A parent’s last decade is not coming around again. The early years of a marriage, when its habits are set like cooling concrete, are not coming around again.
So here is the takeaway, and it is a practice, not a sentiment. Sometime this week, name your for-keeps games out loud. Say to your spouse, or to yourself in the quiet of the car: this marriage is for keeps. These children are for keeps. The time left with my mother is for keeps. Then notice what the naming does to your aim. The couple that knows it is playing for keeps takes more care lining up the shot — the apology, the evening protected from the phone, the visit made this month instead of someday. The marbles in the middle are the best ones you own. Play like it.