Am I living?

So, here is the scenario, and my apologies if it appears confusing and convoluted. If it wasn't so, then I wouldn't be having troubles with it, would I?

I am a Christian. I was raised that way, and that is what I believe in. Heaven, Hell, and a war between them with Earth as the battleground. As part of my upbringing, I went through a program, called Cadets. The code of the Cadets was fairly simple. "A Cadet must be reverent, obedient, compassionate, consecrated, trustworthy, pure, grateful, loyal, industrious and cheerful."

I try to be a good person. But I was having a friendly argument with a friend of mine and realized that I couldn't continue the argument. It took me a bit to figure it out. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not sexist, but this particular friend means a great deal to me, and for whatever reason I have developed certain rules of behaviour for myself when I interact with her. Strangely enough, I also cannot break them. It's not that I cannot break rules, I have, I just don't bother to. Perhaps its due to lack of practice that things go bad when I do break the rules.

Anywho, I think my first issue is figuring out what these rules are. It's not like in board games or table-top where you can just pick up the manual and read what the Game Master have come up with for this version. I wrote these rules, and some of them I don't recognize until I run into them. Kinda like the card game Mao, if you've ever played it.

The way Mao works, is there is a set of base rules, and you use a regular deck of cards. They vary slightly based on how people like to play, but these are the ones I learned.

1. You can lay cards like on like. Red to red, clubs to clubs, Jack to Jack. Really simple.
2. No talking during the game. If you talk, pick up a card.
3. You win by clearing out your hand first.
4. If you win the round, you make a new rule.

Round 4 is where things get interesting. You make a new rule, whatever you like, but it cannot target a specific person or group. So no making anyone named Tim pick up three cards whenever they put one down. Girls are not forced to take off an article of clothing if they put a 10 of Clubs down. The new rule can be something like...If you put an 8 down onto another 8, you have to say "Sandwich". There is one other thing about the new rule. You don't tell anyone about it. That is the issue I've run into, I've managed to create rules about my behaviour that I do not know.

I know it's hard to imagine. How can you hide something from yourself when you can up with it, when it concerns you so directly?

I mentioned my problem to my friend, telling her how I seem to have locked myself in a set of rules, and that I appear to be too foolish to break them. Her suggestion was that I break them and live a little.

Besides the fact that I might be making this harder than needed on myself, or that it might not as simple as she make it out to be, there is another thought. Are these rules preventing me from living?