… Making a long-term relationship work requires that you have a short memory. 

A lot of people start relationships full of energy only to watch them come to a bloody end.  Then, they start another relationship, which ends just like the last one.  Little do they know, they are repeating the same patterns, but are somehow convinced that it’s the world that’s at fault, not them.  You end up going through life dating one person after another, thinking that the next person is the answer to your prayers, when you are really continuously creating your own worst nightmare.

To help those people, I thought it might be fun to put together a list of five ways to ruin your relationships. If you want your relationship to work, you may want to consider doing the opposite.  Here are some things you can do to definitely ruin your relationship…

1) Ignore the other person’s needs – if you ignore your partner’s needs, someone else is not going to ignore them.  In that case, you’re basically a sitting duck waiting to be dumped and cheated on.  At least listen, negotiate and make it clear that the person’s needs are not being ignored, or you may end up looking silly later on down the road.

2) Be selfish and demanding at all times – Selfish and demanding might work in the short-run, but once your partner realizes they can do better, they’re gone.

3) Take lots of relationship advice from other people – Letting those pesky, annoying outsiders in your relationship is only going to make your relationship worse, since you’ll be applying bad advice from people who know nothing about the situation.  It’ll also piss off your mate.

4) Hold grudges and lots of them – making a long-term relationship work requires that you have a short memory.  If you can’t let things go,  you’ll end up letting your love go too.  Learn how to forgive, forget and move on.

5) Be selfish in the bedroom and don’t try very hard to please your mate  – Sex matters a lot to both men and women.  You can tell your mate “no” every single night and give them no sexual energy, but it will only feed into your mate’s fantasies about what a better lover might give them.  Don’t make the mistake of pretending that sex doesn’t matter, it’ll only get you into stupid situations and leave you as the odd person out while your mate gets good sex from someplace else.

This article was first published on Black Like Moi.

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.