I am darn near 35 years old and I have decided that it is time to throw in the towel when it comes to love. Love is like the lottery. You should play because there is a chance you can win but you shouldn’t play too often and you shouldn’t have high hopes because the odds are against you. At 35 I’ve spent almost a third of my three decades in a terrible relationship that morphed into a terrible marriage. I spent another third of my life dating one dud after another. During that time, I was often too damaged from the last dbag to appreciate the next dbag who may not have been a dbag but I was too damaged to know.

Dating sucks that way. You want to give yourself time to recover from the last horrible relationship but another part of you doesn’t want to push away a potentially good opportunity when what seems like a nice guy or girl is knocking at your door. So you take a chance (there’s that lottery again) but you make the mistake of having your hopes a smidgen too high. If you lower them too much, you ruin every interaction with what is perceived as bitterness and dysfunction. If you raise them a tad too high you are looking toward the future when the person hasn’t given you much reason to pencil them in for next week. So how do you manage it? How do you walk the line of cautious optimism?

Each time you purchase a lotto ticket, you can’t deny that regardless of the amount of money spent, an investment in hope was indeed made. With dating it’s no different. The moment you invest your time to text or meet at Starbucks or go to dinner or message online, you made an investment in hope. You want to see where it goes and you are willing to spend to find out.

Gambling becomes an issue when you find yourself investing more than you can afford because you get a high off of the hope of the payout. Dating? Same thing. Dating starts to suck when we invest more than we can stand to lose (time, energy, love, affection, emotions, etc.) and we keep doing it because we feel as if we are close to hitting it big in the jackpot of love. So we become addicted. We date person after person and keep giving and giving only to reach a point where we have to check our ticket and see if it really paid off. It usually doesn’t.

I have heard many people say that there is someone for everyone and that may be true as the world is a large place. However everyone doesn’t decide to be with the someone that is best for them. Whether that is because they are committing relationship sin that is scorned by so many … the “s word” (settling) or they are simply happy enough and don’t care to seek a greater happiness, the person that may be perfect for you is living a mediocre life with someone else. I believe that’s often the reason why a mistress has such a strong conviction that someone else’s cheating husband is actually her soul mate. Maybe he is. But he isn’t leaving his wife and the timing is all wrong. So they steal away together, enjoying their “jackpot” in small increments in the form of one secretive rendezvous after another.

I suppose in a perfect world your soul mate is a person that is available to be with you without drama. Everything is perfect. But then you are back in the lottery mentality again. Have you ever played and won some money and while you were happy, there was a part of you that wanted the jackpot instead? Why? Because we want it all. It’s not enough to find someone that you can enjoy, you want it to be perfect. You want him to be endowed. You want her to look like that celebrity or ex girlfriend. You want him to make that amount of money. You never want her to age. You want him to actually like chick flicks and not just watch them with you. You want her to shut up and watch the game, cook you a good dinner, and perform felatio during half time. We want them to be around when we want company and be scarce when we need alone time. You. Want. The. Jackpot.

But we covered the reality. The jackpot only hits for a select few who play the game. So if you aren’t playing, you aren’t EVER going to win. If you are playing, you have to invest as much as you can stand to lose. So that means that if your emotions are worth $100 and you only want to gamble $1 then don’t be surprised when you have a lot less than what you hoped for. Also understand that investing your emotions completely and putting it all on the table  doesn’t mean that you are going to win or even break even. Remember, it’s all a game of chance. It’s the love lottery. Coming to this conclusion has only encouraged me to throw in the towel. I don’t want to play anymore. I’ve grown tired of increasing the stakes in hopes of getting a higher return. I suffered the consequence of investing the bare minimum thinking I would hit big. I’ve had a few wins and squandered my earnings because it wasn’t “the jackpot”.

So I’m tossing in the towel. If I added up the amount I have invested versus the number of times I’ve had a winning, it hasn’t been very fruitful or even fun. In fact, I realized that it’s just an old habit that needs to die quickly.

You have to pay to play, and well… I’m spent.