Love Is a Game

The literary and lyrical love  
Love can be a game. An intensely lyrical game full of dreams, as the one described by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet:

O! swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,

That monthly changes in her circled orb,

Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

No, no, there is more danger in your eyes than twenty of their swords.

Love can also be a game of flirt and coquette played by the woman, or a game of adventure, conquest and seduction played by the man, as the libertine loves told by Ovid:

You should follow Goddesses examples, and do not disdain the pleasures afforded by your lovers desires.

Love can be a sadomasochistic game, brutal and imposed, or freely allowed, played in the darkness of rooms and staging. Love can be fetishist, as Karl Kraus remembers: 

There is no unhappier creature on earth than a fetishist who yearns to embrace a woman’s shoe and has to embrace the whole woman.

But not all loves are games. Man is an animal who loves to play games, but when reality imposes itself, and our dearest beings are concerned, the game ends. There is no place to game, in the truer loves.