The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a perfect metaphor for relationships in modernity:

If you both act in good faith, you get the best outcome, but if you act out of fear, you can avoid feeling at the expense of destroying your partner.

Now imagine an iterative game with many players.

Now consider how many relationship gurus preach risk aversion tactics and encourage you not to feel.

You can only win if you both trust, but most people prefer to settle for the gamble of not losing as much as the other person.

Now consider that there’s a tab kept by society in this game, like weighted odds or something, and that perceived success or failure rate is public knowledge.

It actually gets harder and harder to win because we *assume* based on this average that everyone cheats.

It’s hard enough to risk trusting, as yourself,

but how do you convince another person who has evidence to suggest it’s more likely that you’re wrong or lying,

or even that it’s just not a good bet to try trusting at all?

It seems the only way to play that has a chance of winning is to play with the full understanding that you’re going to be made the victim, and to do it anyway.

All you need is one person to trust you, and you win, and you push the odds back towards the positive.

The strategy is to love with the acceptance that you *will* be hurt, and to not flinch from it when the time comes.

To do otherwise *guarantees* that you will not win, even if you’re not the ultimate loser.

For more, here's an article I just wrote explaining the concept: https://twitter.com/Libera_Rex/status/1247221490032037894?s=20

https://www.aion.media/masterself/prisoners-dilemma