Raise your hand if you've ever been in a relationship. Now lower your hand if that relationship wasn't with another person. Now lower it if the other person was a member of your own family, you sick bastard. Now lower your hand if you are currently in a relationship that has lasted more than 3 days. If your hand is still up, you probably suck at being in a relationship. If it's not up, you may suck at it anyway. Now I know what you're thinking: you're thinking "you don't know me, who the heck are you to tell me I'm bad at being a boyfriend or girlfriend?" Well, first of all, if you don't know whether you're a boyfriend or a girlfriend you're already in serious trouble. That aside, however, you suck at it because nobody's ever told you how to not suck at it. Until now. The key to a healthy relationship, professionals will tell you, is communication. They are half right. The other half is what I'm going to start with, which is knowing when to keep that fly-trap of yours shut, and when to nut up and take responsibility for fucking up. I'll begin with an example from my own life. I recently made two serious mistakes with my boyfriend in under a week. The end result? No change at all, because I'm not a moron. Guys, when you screw up with your us there are three things you can do. You can try to shift responsibility to her, you can try to minimize its importance, or you can be a fucking man, stand up, and apologize. If you do the first, you're giving her the right to slap you in the face with a waffle iron for being far too stupid for anyone's good. If you're a good boyfriend, you know enough to shut the hell up when she's telling you what you did wrong, and if she's right then you apologize for it and make a mental note to not do that thing again. Incidentally, apologizing is often followed by makeup sex, so even if you didn't screw up it's sometimes worth apologizing anyway, but you didn't hear that from me. When I screwed up, and he told me what I'd done and why he was upset, there were several places where I could have said things like "but if you were done anyway, what's the problem?" or "but I was doing it" or "I swear that reminds me of KY Jelly." I didn't say those though, because that would have been me trying to play down the importance of him being hurt. Instead I thought about it, realized that it was an ass thing for me to do, and I apologized for it. Then voila sex. See how easy that is? No. If you don't close the page and discontinue your internet service.NOW.Do it. Now, the other side of this is when your girlfriend thinks you screwed up, and you know you did. In that case you look at what you did, ask for her forgivness, realize you didn't do anything wrong after all, and say so. Because under your breath that what you fellas think and say. Women, if your guy does that, it's your job to decide whether you're the one who needs to apologize (but it's never our fault, which, again, is often followed by sex) for accusing him. If neither of you think you should apologize, then whichever of you doesn't really care about the outcome should give in, because it's clearly not important to the other person, but *note: Sex. Of course this goes both ways as well. Ladies, if your guy is upset because you're doing something inconsiderate or rude or selfish or whatever else, the same rules apply, and it's also an not a good move for you guys to say we're screwing up when we're not. The blade cuts one way, just like relationships do. We all know this by now. So think think think. Now, back to communication. We all need to know when to shut up, but we also need to know when not to stay quiet. I know someone who almost lost her family because she and her husband weren't communicating well. You want to know what happened to her? She bent over and admitted her part in it, and they're doing fine now. Thanks to that 3 letter word sex. If you want to be happy in your relationship, and there's something stopping you from doing that, then tell the other person what's wrong so they can fucking fix it! And if you're happy in your relationship but you suspect your partner may not be, ask them what's wrong, because if you don't know about it you can't help. If you are unhappy in your relationship and your partner doesn't know it, it's your own damn fault for sucking at it.
