How To Lose Your Relationship In 10 Easy Ways

-- and then there’s 10 more

You don’t need to be Kate Hudson in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days to succeed at driving your partner away. Try these all time favorite relationship blunders for an almost guaranteed effect – and if you want to keep your relationship because actually the person you’re with is someone you actually love? Well, you know what to do….  None of the following:

1.  Don't trust your mate.

Trust your mate? Heck no! Lock her up and forbid any personal space. Check her cell phone for text messages from another imaginary man. Forbid him to have nights with the boys. Monitor his phone bill and snoop through his pockets. Drive past each other’s house to see if they are home or going out (or worse -- they have someone else’s car in the driveway!)

2.  Push the relationship too hard, too soon.

Some people know the moment they meet that they are meant to be together. It doesn’t matter if they see each other every day – it just feels right. However, most relationships don’t work this way.

Most relationships take time to develop, to grow in strength, and for partners to feel comfortable with one another. Push this too fast by wanting to live together or seeking commitment before the time is right, and you might scare your mate away.   

3.  Take your partner for granted

Collapse on her sofa and stick your dirty work boots on her freshly cleaned coffee table. Tell your best friend that he’ll move her out of her 17th floor apartment without asking him first. Chuck your dirty washing in her washing machine and leave it there for 4 days. Adopt the “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine too” motto. Try just being rude to one another to see how long the other person will take it on the chin.

4.  Stop talking to each other

Hey, just stop talking to each other (of course, yelling or launching into personal attacks is fine). Once communication is killed, the relationship becomes terminally ill.  Unless the communication is given some rapid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, you’re a goner.

5.  Downgrade the priority of the relationship

Here is a sure-fire way to get rid of an unwanted partner. Make her compete for your attention with your car/motorbike, your boat, your dog, your mother, your friends and finally your football team. Make him compete for your attention with your cat, mother, best friend in crisis, second best friend in crisis, hairdresser, personal trainer and guy who makes the coffee at the local Starbucks.

6.  Ignore your personal hygiene

Nostril hair? No problem – provided it reaches your chin. Picking your nose in public? Did you pick a winner? Letting the wind escape because you think it’s better out than in? Shower once a week to conserve water? Washing your hair once a month? Ignoring brushing your teeth altogether because you can replace them with dentures when they all fall out? Hey, who needs any pride in their appearance to feel good about themselves?

7.  Put down your partner in public

Being in public is an excellent opportunity to lose your relationship. Putting someone down or treating them like a fool (especially when the whole neighborhood can hear you) is almost certainly going to send any nice, decent partner running for the hills.

8.  Abuse your partner in any way

Try emotional, physical or sexual abuse since any of them work the same. All are guaranteed to send a sensible partner off on someone else’s journey and they might also send you on your own… into jail for a cooling off period.

9.  Make her do all the chores

She’s a woman, right? They’re meant to do all the chores and you’re meant to sit on the sofa with a beer, surfing through the cable TV channels to locate your favorite sport. In fact, why stop there when you can create even more housework for her just in case she manages to complete her tasks. No-one wants to see a woman get bored around the house, do they?

10.  Be cheap.

Take him out and make him pay for everything. When it’s your turn, take him somewhere cheap. Despite his lavish treatment of you, make him repay his loan of $10 – because you don’t want to get your expenses running away on you do you? Invite yourself over to her house and drink all her wine and leave. Then do the same over and over again. Just make sure you turn up empty-handed.

11. Nagging

When are you going to take out the garbage? How long do I have to wait until you walk the dog? It cost WHAT?! Don’t just ask him or her once; try to ask them over and over up to one hundred times! There are plenty of subtle approaches you can use. Try “when are you going to take out the garbage?” followed up by “go, on - have 3 guesses why the aroma of rotting food is wafting through our house?” followed up by “Is it true that dangerous rodents breed in full, smelly garbage bins that sit near houses?”

12. Using offensive humor

Why not crack a rude joke about the country she was born in? Or crack a joke about his religion when you know he’s serious about it? Or perhaps you can invent rude jokes about each other’s families? To master the art of using offensive humor to drive someone away, simply write down all their values and beliefs, and target each of them with some type of lame derogatory statement.

13. Being a slob

Why walk to the kitchen for a beer out of the fridge when you can just move the fridge into the living room to be next to your arm chair? Why put your empty milk carton in the trash when you can just toss it onto the carpet somewhere? Sadly many families’s homes look like bombs have hit them, distributing a mountain of stuff in a thousand different directions, and this is known affectionately as “having children.” But if you don’t have kids, and you don’t have walkways through your house either, this could definitely turn your relationship into a thing of the past.

14.  Cheating on one another (even flirting works)

Why be loyal, trustworthy and faithful? You don’t even need to go as far as having an affair to undermine the security and trust within your relationship. You can just head out for a night on the town and chat up every single girl you meet. If you sleep around, his pride will be wounded so that will mean he hits the high road or her trust in you will be broken and she’ll find someone else who she thinks is more committed to her.

15.  Refuse to have sex.

Fold your legs over your knees, or roll over with your back to your partner and complain about headaches and being tired. And continue to do it, night after night, for weeks or months at a time.

16.  Allow your parents to interfere regularly.

Welcome your parents into your relationship and give them unbridled opportunity to interfere, and to start telling your partner what to do and how to live their life. You can reason to yourself that you can boss her around so surely it is okay if your mama does too (after all, mama bossed you around as a kid and you turned out just fine). Or you can reassure yourself that your daddy is just making sure his princess is fine and her prince charming is indeed a hard-working honorable character. What to do if your partner complains? Just tell your partner that it’s their own fault because your parents mean well and your partner should just go along with whatever they say or think (and not be so independent, headstrong or over-sensitive).

17.  Get addicted to something.

You have a wide choice of potential addictions all of which are well-known relationship destroyers. These include (but are not limited to) gambling, illicit drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol, sex and so on. If you prefer, you can be fanatical and this can tend to have the same effect as an addiction.

18. Set about changing them.

Start every conversation with “I really love you BUT….” Or try cleaning out his closet and tossing that awful tie (the one he says is his favorite) in the trash because really gray isn’t his color, he needs something bolder like bright orange. Or perhaps you could encourage her to give away her evening with the girls once a month because really her life should revolve solely around you.

19. Ring them constantly when you’re out drunk at 3am

It’s wonderful to be spontaneous in relationships, and when you realize at 3am (after a substantial number of glasses of wine) that deep down you really do love him, just call him and let him know. He’s really going to appreciate your call.

20.  Put your friends first.

Here is my personal favorite. Why prioritize your partner?

I mean, they get in the way of your friendships because they dampen your nights out with the boys, they want your attention when you want to tinker with your car and, on top of all that, they get annoyed by your loving, sweet mother who is just trying to help by telling her what to do.

Or she stays on the phone to her girlfriends for hours and hours (I mean, what can she possibly be talking about that takes longer than ten minutes?), ignoring my calls for my dinner.

So here we’ve outlined plenty of great strategies to use to kill your relationship. Kaput… just like that. But what do you do when your partner is truly terrific and the very thought of losing him or her makes you break out into a cold sweat?

You know exactly what to do! It’s simply none of the above.

Fiona Mackenzie is the author of How To Know: When To Separate, a practical eBook that deals with the relationship topic of how to know when it is over. How To Know: When To Separate includes tips, strategies and techniques used by the author to manage the end of her relationship and learn how to be happy once more.