Playing With Myself

Get your mind out of the gutter: I’m talking about solitaire.

I want to thank Wes Cherry. It used to be that the zeitgeist of America was its mobility. The one thing that everyone had in common with everyone else was that they had moved from someplace else to where they were and were probably going to move again, then the two World Wars established a commonality of experience and understanding.

Television came along and the collective unconscious was forever affected by Lassie’s bark, warnings to Will Robinson, the bark of M16s in Vietnam and those funky bass solo riffs that began Seinfeld. But now, thanks to Wes Cherry and his transformational programming skills, we have a commonality that transcends all national borders, a new international zeitgeist: computer solitaire. Everyone plays it, and everyone plays the same game by the same rules, even inlcuding the one-card cheat on the deal-three option.

The thing I like about Mr. Cherry’s computer solitaire is that it lends itself to so many analogies to life.

Like life, if you make a bad, uninformed or simply unfortunate choice you cannot go back and change it. No mulligans, no do-overs.

Also like life (but unlike analogue solitaire (real cards)) once the game is over you can not turn the unexposed cards over and figure out what might have been: if on the last play you could move either of the red fives onto a black six you get to chose one and if it reveals an unplayable card you are done. No peeking into what might have been.

Also like life, so many decisions have to be made upon inadequate information, inadequate often times because it’s simply not available, often times because you weren’t paying attention… (Is the other eight in the discard pile?) And like life you are inexorably bound by those decisions.

In my book, How To Save Your Marriage by Becoming a Better Man, I talk a bit about decision making paradigms, and I focused there on how important it is to make decisions that take you somewhere rather than decisions that protect you or are fear based, but Mr. Cherry’s program affords an excellent platform for expanding that analysis.

Consider this scenario: you’ve about halfway through the deck, and you play a red seven off the deck onto a black eight, revealing the prior discard, a red three. You move your black six off the five pile to your newly played red seven and uncover the other red three, and as fate would have it, you have a black four showing on the two pile. What do you do? Play the three from the discard pile or from the five-pile?

Or worse, you move the last card in a pile over to another, but you have two kings already in play, one on the six pile and one on the four. Which one do you move to the vacant spot?

And like life, you can ponder and dither and worry over these decisions for minutes or even hours and come no closer to a rational plan of action.

Perhaps a card counter and master mathematician could make an informed decision in either case based upon the cards already discarded and the order they were in when taken in conjunction with the cards then showing and the number of concealed cards remaining in each pile. Likewise in life a trained psychologist who is as wise as the Dalai Lama and as logical as Star Trek’s Spock might be able, under the proper circumstances, to make the right choice in a relationship: Should I move on? Have I done all I can do? Should I be angry? Should she apologize?

All of these are, at times, as unknowable as “Should I move the red king from pile two or the black king from pile six?”

Thus in Mr. Cherry’s solitaire I made some policy decisions, I established some protocols for how I would deal with unknowing choices. For example, if I have a choice of moving either of two cards from piles to a new pile, all things being equal, I move the one furthest away. I have two exceptions to that rule, the first being to work the “mine that’s producing”: if I turn up a double choice as I am running through a pile, I’ll move that card. The second caveat to the rule is if moving one of the two cards will create an open spot and I have a king to play.

Now here’s the thing you need to remember: my rules are pretty arbitrary. Sure, I did a little thinking about how to bring as many cards into play before I decided to add the exceptions, but the rule about the moving the furthest card is purely arbitrary. I have to move one of them and in order to avoid the unpleasant dithering, second guessing and worry, not to mention moving the game along, I have simply chosen to move the furthest card.

There always remains the possibility that had I moved the other card I might win, or I might not, but as I have no way of knowing it’s truly immaterial. As the saying goes, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”

So too in life, you have to set some arbitrary guidelines for how you are going to make your decisions. In my experience most people kind of go on an ad hoc gut feeling approach about things which leads often to widely varied responses to similar circumstances.

Take the situation where perhaps you suspect your beloved may not have been truthful about some little thing. Early in your relationship you’ll probably let it slide and forget about it, but later in the relationship, when perhaps you are not as trusting, it becomes an issue and a question that worries and nags at you. Further on, when your impression of your beloved is tainted by your growing resentment it becomes not only of tantamount importance but yet another example of betrayal, demonstrative evidence that you should either pack your bags or kick her out.

In all three instances you come to different conclusions about how to react based upon no discernable facts, but rather about how you feel about your partner at the moment. It is the functional equivalent of moving one king over the other because you “feel lucky” or “it seems right.”

Thus, one rule I have made about my relationships is that I construe everything in the light most favorable to my beloved. If she says while doing something else “Will you take out the garbage” I could construe it to mean “why haven’t you taken out the garbage” “didn’t I tell you to take out the garbage” “you never take out the garbage” “stop that unimportant shit and do what I want” “the least you can do is take out the garbage” “I hate you and the horse you rode in on” and with each of those constructions I will generate an antipathy towards her that is, in all likely hood, completely spurious and unfounded. Alternatively, I can take it as meaning “please take out the garbage” which is a reasonable enough request for me to make of her should the situation be reversed.

But what about the lie? What about the exceptions and caveats to the decision making process?

In law we have different standards of proof. For a criminal conviction the jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. That comes out to about ninety-five percent sure. In a civil case the jury has to find by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant committed the tortuous act or breached the contract. That means it is more likely than not that it happened, or say fifty-one percent. In some instances it has to be clear and convincing evidence, figure seventy-five percent, but in no case does a jury have to find absolutely, one-hundred percent sure that something happened.

In relationships, we generally don’t bother placing any kind of standard on our decisions. If we are angry were generally one hundred percent sure of whatever fact serves our interest best, and if we are worried we wonder if we shouldn’t be one hundred percent sure before we do anything about the thing that scares us most. Some people simply believe what they want without regard as to whether there is a ten or a ninety percent chance they are right. If you were to take this approach playing solitaire you would never play the game consistently and you would spend a lot of time blaming yourself afterwards for your poor choices. “See? I should have moved the red king!” you might say, but you would be saying it because you had no foundation for the decision in the first place. When everything is hit or miss, there is no responsibility.

So, long story short, decide what your standard of proof will be: fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy… it is your call, you just need to define it and apply it consistently. If you have set a boundary and you suspect it has been crossed and your burden of proof is met then you say, “Honey, we gotta talk” and you act upon your convictions, accepting the consequence of being wrong with the same grace as if you’d been right. You don’t get do overs or mulligans… but you do get to move on with your life.