There are plenty of guides online about how to have a safe, healthy, happy, fulfilling sexual relationship. This is not one of those guides. Instead, this post is about ways you can screw up your sexual relationship–the little tricks and techniques that are sure to doom even the most healthy of relationships and send any hope of happiness spiraling into the ground. It’s easier than you think, and with the application of these few simple techniques, you can ruin your relationship and make yourself and your partner miserable in no time! Ready? Then on we go!

Don’t ask for what you want.
We all have things we like to do or things we’d like to try. There’s a simple way to explore these things: just tell your partner you’re interested in trying them. After all, you can’t expect to get what you want if you never ask for what you want!

One great way to make yourself frustrated and angry, and make your partner confused and upset, is to want something but not ask for it, and expect your partner to read your mind. For extra bonus points, you can beat around the bush and drop hints about it but never come right out and ask for it; and to make things even more painful, you can become angry at your partner for not giving it to you, or expect that if your partner really loved you, “of course” he or she should just know that you want it. This one tip can do wonders for taking a positive, healthy relationship and reducing it to a resentful mass of frustration in no time!

Hide things from your partner.
Whether it;s your sexual past or the things you want to try, and whether you’re hiding it because you’re ashamed of it or hiding it because you think your partner “can’t handle” it, fewer techniques are more successful at wrecking a relationship than just keeping your mouth shut. It’s easy and it’s insidious, corroding the very heart of a relationship from within.

The nice thing about hiding things from your partner is that it’s so easy to rationalize doing it. There are many reasons people seek to conceal things from their partners: because they fear being judged if their partner knows the truth, because they fear rejection, because they’re worried their partner will find them less suitable, because they fear their partners will think them less capable or less qualified, or because they fear abandonment.

Hiding things from your partner destroys intimacy and trust. Intimacy is the act of sharing yourself with another person; with everything that you refuse to share, you reduce intimacy. When you refuse to share with your partner because you fear that your partner will find you less capable or less interesting if you tell the truth, you open yourself to making your partner feel like you baited him or her and entered the relationship on false pretenses. When you conceal things because you fear being judged, you create the possibility that your partner will distrust you, and you create the idea that your partner should judge you for those things. When you conceal things because you fear that your partner might be made insecure by them or might feel threatened by them, you strengthen your partner’s insecurity. All these are splendid ways to weaken and undermine your relationship by destroying the foundation of trust and intimacy a relationship needs in order to survive.

As an added bonus, if you conceal the right kind of information, you can actually jeopardize the sexual health of you and your partner, which can create consequences far beyond the end of your relationship!

Be jealous, controlling, and/or manipulative.
Jealousy, te desire to control your partner, and the tendency to manipulate your partner in indirect ways are the perfect trifecta of relationship-killers. Any one of them by itself can make a sexual relationship into a shambles; all three together are no-fail techniques for turning your relationship into a smoking crater.

Many people regard jealousy as the natural and inevitable response to thinking about your partner’s sexual past, and some people even think that jealousy “proves” that you love someone. Hold on tightly to those ideas, and you’re already on your way to undermining your relationship.

When you take your feelings and use them as a reason to control your partner, or believe that the only way to fight those feelings is to tell your partner what to do or check up on your partner, you feed into the jealousy, making it stronger and establishing it as the centerpiece of the relationship. Do these things in indirect or passive-aggressive ways, so that your partner feels manipulated, and you’ll intensify the destructive effects a thousandfold.

Simply talking about jealousy, openly and honestly, without any attempt to justify or rationalize it, can often make it diminish, and remove the feeling that you need to control or manipulate your partner. But that way leads to a positive and secure relationship, so be careful not to do it!

Believe in the scarcity of love.
Nothing can make a person hang on to a bad relationship for a long time than the notion that love is scarce and that if the relationship ends, you’ll be alone forever and ever–and nothing is more damaging than remaining in a bad relationship for a very long time. Especially if you convince yourself that the relationship is absolutely perfect and wonderful except for this one bad thing, so you should keep it in spite of the bad thing.

A relationship that is perfect and wonderful except for one bad thing is a relationship that is not perfect and wonderful. Especially when that “one bad thing” is “complete, total incompatibility in bed.”

We are told that somewhere out there is The One for us, that one person in all the world of six billion people who is our soulmate, our one and only shot at happiness, the one person put on this earth just for us…who, in an amazing stroke of statistical improbability, just so happens to go to the same school or work at the same company that we do. So once the relationship begins, we better not let go of it for any reason, and CERTAINLY not for any reason involving sex, because then we’ll never be happy again.

Most people look for a sexually monogamous relationship. That means the person we are involved with is the only person we can turn to to meet our sexual needs. If that person is unwilling or unable to meet them, that’s a big deal.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a partner who is sexually compatible, or with choosing partners willing and able to meet your sexual need. There is also nothing wrong with ending a relationship that does not meet any of your needs; after all, outside the fairy tales, love is abundant. Ending a relationship does not sentence you to being alone and miserable forever; the potential for love is all around you, and there are people out there with whom you can build a wonderful relationship that has no “buts” or “except fors”.

Of course, that idea leads to happiness and success in your relationships, though, so if you want to wreck a relationship, make sure you cling to the idea that your sexual needs are unimportant and that you can’t leave a relationship without fear of being alone forever.

And that leads us to:

Downplay, diminish, or understate your needs, and convince yourself that your needs aren’t important.
This is remarkably easy to do, and can let you wreck your sex life with almost no effort at all! Simply convince yourself that what you want is bad or wrong, or what you want is unimportant, and youre already halfway toward ruining your relationship.

We live in a society that already brings us halfway there by the time we’re teenagers to begin with. We’re told, over and over, that sex is not the most important part of a relationship, that sex isn’t really a need, that you shouldn’t want it more than a certain number of times, that if you have unusual sexual tastes you’re a sick pervert…just believe any of these things, and you can make your sex life wretched and unfulfilling in no time.

Sex is an important and positive part of any healthy adult’s life. Sex creates bonds of intimacy, sex brings you closer to your partner, and on top of that, sex is fun. And the human sexual experience is huge–vaster than the sky and deeper than the ocean. It’s something to be reveled in, appreciated, embraced and explored.

Given how powerful, intoxicating, fun, and intimate sex is, if you want to ruin your relationship, ruining your sex life is a great way to start. You can begin the process by not talking about what you want, as mentioned earlier, and nothing makes this easier than persuading yourself that your wants and desires are not important, or that you shouldn’t even want it in the first place. Try to cultivate an attitude that says your needs don’t matter and that even if they did matter, they’re just plain “too weird” anyway, and you’ll go a long way to wrecking your relationship right there.

One good technique that you can add on top of this is to pretend to enjoy sex when you don’t, or pretend to be satisfied when you’re not. Not only does this conceal things from your partner and downplay your own needs, it also makes sure that things will never get better–because your partner believes that you’re happy.

Attach things to sex that you don’t really feel.
Oftentimes, we are brought up to believe that sex for pleasure, without love or romance, is Bad and Wrong, and that good people never, ever do it. Now, the fact is, some people enjoy no-strings sex, and some people don’t. All that is perfectly fine, and is part of the normal variability of the human sexual condition. As long as you’re honest about what you’re doing, it’s all good. So a great way to destroy your relationships is to be dishonest with yourself about what you feel about sex.

This can take many forms. For example, if you believe that recreational sex is Bad and Wrong, and that any good person would never, ever want to do it, then sometimes you can manage to persuade yourself that you are madly in love with every person you are ever sexually intimate with..even if you aren’t. Convincing yourself you’re in love just because you have had sex is a great way to undermine your relationship life and hurt your partners, especially if you’re not even consciously aware that you’re being dishonest because you’re so wrapped up in the notion that you would never separate sex from love because you’re just not that kind of person. Having a judgmental attitude helps, too.

On the flip side of the same coin, if you begin a friends-with-benefits relationship because you secretly harbor unspoken romantic feelings for your partner, and some tiny part of you locked away deep inside is hoping that your partner will fall in love with you as soon as you start having sex, you’re setting yourself up for crushing disappointment and lots of drama. You get extra points if you never tell your partner that you have these feelings, double extra points if you never admit to yourself that you have these feelings, and triple extra points if you let your partner believe that the relationship is strictly “friends with benefits” until he or she finds another partner, then freak out.

Honesty with others begins with honesty with yourself, so you can nip off any potential good relationship and make sure all your relationships are angsty, drama-prone messes just by being dishonest with yourself. What could be easier?

Start relationships with people who don’t want the same things you want.
This often-overlooked technique is a great way to create a stressful, unfulfilling relationship. Want monogamy? Start a relationship with someone who is polyamorous! Want kids? Start a relationship with a partner who hates kids! Want a mad, passionate D/s relationship filled with adventure and exploration of the deepest forms of kink? Start a relationship with a person who’s sexually conservative! Nothing more to say about that, really.

Create an environment where it’s not safe for your partner to talk to you, especially about sex.
This is easier to do than you think. Start by being critical and judgmental of people whose ideas about sexuality are different from yours: “Did you see Sue in that dress? What a tramp!” “Did you know that Mary started sleeping with Joe? What a slut she is!” Then, don’t talk directly to your partner about sex, but make sure you find indirect ways to let him or her know how judgmental you are. And finally, punish your partner for talking directly to you about sex.

There are lots of ways to do this. One of the best is to tell your partner “Honey, you can talk to me about anything,” then laugh if your partner tries to talk to you about sex. This is especially effective if you laugh when your partner tries telling you about some deep, inner fantasy or desire that sounds unusual to you and that your partner can talk about only with great difficulty. If you combine this with the first technique, withholding information, and never talk to your partner about your sexual ideas or fantasies, then you can do a lot to make sure your partner will never be able to communicate openly with you. This is a great lead-in to the next technique, which is…

Slam the door on any new sexual ideas.
Many people complain that their sex lives become more boring when they’ve been together for a while. It’s common for couples who have been together to have less sex, to get into a routine, and this can (if you let it) really suck the joy and fun right out of a sexual relationship. It’s simple to make this happen; all you have to do is not try anything new.

If you want to develop the habit of slamming the door in your partner’s face, just remember these three magic little words: “That’s too weird.” Try to develop an idea that doing anything new, especially if it sounds strange or uncomfortable to you, is “weird,” and make sure you tell your partner so on a regular basis. Refuse to do anything that isn’t “normal” and refuse to try any ideas your partner may suggest, and it won’t take long at all to make your sex life boring and joyless.

Sometimes, when you think about trying something new, you may be afraid that you’ll be uncomfortable, or that it will seem silly. This is all perfectly normal; any new thing you try for the first time, whether it’s riding a bicycle or playing a video game or trying the Monkey with Lotus and Open Palm position, is uncomfortable and feels awkward and silly at first. If you’re willing to experiment in spite of feeling awkward and silly, your sex life will soon blossom in creative new ways and you’ll never be bored in bed. But an exciting sex life goes a long way toward making a happy relationship, so make sure you don’t go there–instead, use your feelings of discomfort or silliness to shoot your partner down whenever he or she wants to try something new.

When you’re learning what your partner likes in bed, try to take shortcuts by thinking in generalities instead of specifics.
If you’re trying to cook a romantic dinner for your partner, you probably wouldn’t go to the grocery store and ask the people there “Which do guys like better, seafood or beef?” or “Is it true that women like hollandaise sauce?” We know that different people have different tastes, and the best way to cook your partner’s favorite meal is to ask your partner what his or her favorite meal is. It stands to reason that the same is true about sex, which means that one good tool for building an unfulfilling sex life is to try to figure out what “girls like” or “guys like” rather than trying to find out what your partner likes.

The fact is, there is no such thing as what “guys like” in bed, any more than there is such a thing as what kind of sauce “girls like.” Because every person is different, that means you have to approach your partner as an individual. You’d never dream of trying to cook your partner a meal based on what you guess “guys like,” and the same is true of sex.

If you want a good sex life, that is.

And finally, if you’ve put these hints and suggestions into practice and you’ve made good progress toward creating a frustrating sex life that leaves you and your partner unsatisfied, there’s one last thing you can do to make your relationship explode dramatically:

Cheat.
By putting these tips into practice, you can help make sure that your sex life doesn’t meet your needs or the needs of your partner, and that you’re left feeling unfulfilled. Once you’ve reached this point, you’ll probably find yourself unhappy, and your need for positive sexual contact will likely grow and grow over time until it becomes a volcano of pent-up demand. At this point, it’s time to nuke what’s left of your relationship from orbit, which you can do just by cheating.

Now, keep in mind that there are ways to cheat other than by boffing the neighborhood grocery clerk! “Cheating” means “breaking the rules;” anything you do which violates the rules, tacit or explicit, of your relationship counts as cheating. If you’re doing something you don’t think you can tell your partner about, you’re very probably cheating.

Having a sexually unfulfilling relationship lays the groundwork for cheating, because sex is a basic human drive, and building a relationship that does not meet your sexual needs offers you no way to satisfy that drive short of going outside the relationship. Having an unmet need helps you to justify and rationalize cheating, and meeting the need in ways other than having intercourse with some other person helps you to persuade yourself that whatever it is you’re doing isn’t “really” cheating.

To increase the yield of the resulting thermonuclear explosion when your partner finds out–and odds are pretty good that your partner will, eventually, find out–deny it when you’re caught, then blame your partner when your denials are penetrated.

These simple techniques, used at home, can make a mess of your sex life in less time than you might have believed possible. These time-tested, tried-and-true suggestions have damaged or destroyed countless relationships in the past, and they can work for you, too!

Disclaimer: This post is intended as absurdist humor. I am not seriously suggesting that these are things you should actually do, unless for some reason you actually do want a dysfunctional relationship. Nor is this intended as an attack on any specific person, living or dead, real or fictional. I hope that this disclaimer is not really necessary, and the intent of this post is clear.