Portfolio Diversification #3: When it Backfires on the Players

(Please note that I've been experiencing some font and spacing issues with blogspot. Hope to have that resolve shortly.)

In the last post I talked about players and Portfolio Diversification. It can get a little depressing so let me share a few examples of how it could backfire for players:

A friend of mine was interested in a boy for the longest time. He was the son of her parents’ friends and everyone sorta assumed they’d get married one day. Because of that the guy never tried very hard. He played, and played, and played, until one day he heard that my friend was getting married. All of a sudden he’s all pissy and feeling betrayed about it. The arrogance! Sorry buddy, she already moved on-quite a while back actually.

Once a boy told me we should “take a break”. By his definition that means he wanted to date and explore other possibilities, while keeping the option to come back to me down the line. I said sure let’s “take a break”. A few months later he called me up. Oops, he forgot to ask me what my definition of those words was. Needless to say, it was slightly different from his.

Players might get the breadth, but not the depth of the people they date. You know what they say about reading the first page of every book doesn’t make you a scholar. They might look like they have an impressive portfolio, but really it only takes one yes to win in the game of love, and disrespecting your potentials is not the way to do it. Last, let me leave you with the story of Sir Richard Francis Burton.

Sir Burton was a great British explorer of his time, and had a big thing for erotic literature (he is best-remembered as the man who brought the Kama Sutra to publication in English). It’s suggested that his personal life was just as colorful as his books. But eventually he settled down with a deeply religious Victorian wife, and did more writing and less thrill-seeking. After his death, she read his writing and was horrified by its sexual content (which is probably rated PG by today’s standards). So what did she do? She burned his manuscripts! Yep, she burned them! Talk about the ultimate Revenge of the Nice Girl.

Oops, guess he didn’t see that one coming! The best laid plans and all (snicker)...