Thursday, November 26, 2009

Baby, I love you, but I just can't smile

A few weeks ago at my friend's birthday party, we played a game I haven't played since about second grade, called "Baby, I love you, but I just can't smile." In this game, one person goes up to another person and says something along the lines of "Baby, if you love me, please smile." The "victim" then has to say the name of the game without laughing and/or smiling. If they laugh, they have to do it to someone else. And so on and so forth.

While my memories of playing this as a second-grader are somewhat blurry, playing it in a group of 16/17-year-olds was definitely different, to say the least. I've always found it amusing to watch, because it's somewhat funny to watch people try and be as comically romantic as possible within the bounds of good taste. Unfortunately, I've conditioned myself to laugh whenever I'm nervous, so I ended up "it" pretty quickly, and I realized I had no idea how to do this to somebody else. Even though I consider myself not entirely naive with regards to sexual matters, it's extremely uncomfortable and unnatural for me to actually participate in even mocking them.

Another game that seems popular among the teenage population that are tough for aces is "Truth or Dare." Arguably this shouldn't be hard in theory, but anyone who has ever played Truth or Dare with an average group of teenagers has witnessed the tendency of players to go straight to "the good stuff;" i. e., the questions about "liking" people and having sex and all that jazz. The problem is, there seems to be a disinclination among teens to believe that it's possible for a person to not "like" someone constantly; Truth or Dare was actually what led me to making up the crush I pretended to have for a good four years. For aces playing with non-ace participants who aren't sensitive to asexuality, the game rapidly becomes either a disappointment or a case of denial.

I can only imagine how horrible playing games like "Spin the Bottle" or "Seven Minutes in Heaven" must be for aces, thankfully having never experienced them myself.

On the other hand, the one game that we do have a decided advantage with is "Never Have I Ever..." Dominating this game works best when playing mostly with people have been sexually or romantically active, but you can still knock a lot of fingers down with "Never have I ever had a crush on a boy...or a girl...or anybody else..."

4 comments:

  1. Ah hah, I remember the pretend crushes. It seemed that it was compulsory to always have a crush on at least two boys at a time for playing MASH, so I always picked the same two- one who shared my love of Harry Potter and who was gay (figured we could just chat about HP, and I could read while he went out with his boyfriend), and one who had once helped me when I hurt myself - both these guys lived abroad, so I could pretend to crush on them whilst being safe in the knowledge that none of my friends would ever meet them.

    I'd never heard of "Baby, I love you, but I just can't smile". The premise makes me laugh

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm going to read your newest post after this comment, but I just wanted to say that I was a little worried about you then. I hope we did a good, inconspicuous job of trying to spare you some discomfort . . .

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think that if I'd ever played Seven Minutes in Heaven, it would have led me to conclude I was asexual much earlier than age 20. :-/ Anyway, I thought this post was interesting. It got me to start thinking about my own experiences with similar games, which I'm planning to post about on Monday-- links to your blog included, of course! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. haha, yeah, I played Never Have I Ever one time. Eventually it just got too ridiculous. I wasn't sexually experienced at all, lol. So I didn't put up my fingers to as many questions as were asked.

    As for Truth or Dare, whenever I played it with people about my age, and I'd honestly answer 'I have no crush' then people would think I was a liar or just too shy to admit it. I'd even had some girls who were my friends at the time pester me about it, telling me all about their secret crushes, and so to not feel out of the loop I told them that I did think someone was cute. And then they declared him my crush and tried to help me 'get' him. And he wasn't my crush, I just thought he had a cute face. =/

    ReplyDelete