Guidelines For Living With Your Girlfriend

Minimize eye contact. Yes. When living with your girlfriend it is important to establish mental boundaries to stymie emotional connectivity and feelings of passion. Minimizing eye contact with your girlfriend will effectively distance the both of you as well as create a sense of estrangement in which you both are likely to begin feeling as if you do not “know” each other anymore (like – she’ll say, with pleading, sad eyes, “I feel like I don’t even know you anymore. What’s happening to us?”) Minimizing eye contact further adds to feelings of suspicion and jealousy, especially when executed after nights out or unexplained three-day absences.

Tips:

• Just when she enters the room, turn your back to her.
• Conduct all conversation – which should also be minimized (see below) – on a couch that’s next to a window. Look out the window at all times, whether you’re being addressed or doing the addressing.
• Alternatively, keep your laptop open and near at all times. Whenever she’s in the room, appear interested in something on the laptop screen.

Steer all conversation toward a situation where conversation isn’t happening anymore. Living with your girlfriend, it is important to keep communication to the bare, bare (barest) minimum. This will allow secrets to be kept, shame to develop, and an almost complete disregard for each other’s emotional needs to blossom. Moreover, avoiding conversation will slowly but surely drive a large wedge between the two of you and will result in the sort of long term ‘conditioning’ that is key to survival in any relationship that appears as if it’s setting itself up to be “for the long haul.”

Tips:

• If the two of you are sitting on the couch, not knowing what to do but feeling like you have to do something, just suggest a mutually quiet activity, like using the internet on different laptops or reading.
• Again, have your laptop open at all times. If a pause in your conversation occurs, quickly begin checking the internet. If she tries talking, hold up your hand. “Hold on,” you say. “I… got an email.”
• If you guys need something from the store, always volunteer to be the one to get it, immediately. Walk to the store as slowly as possible, and be sure to have a long conversation with the store clerk.

Don’t cook/ clean/ maintain your apartment by default. Living with your girlfriend necessitates that your primary stance on every domestic responsibility is simply that it is not your responsibility. Your stance is sort of like a preemptive strike in the whole responsibility war – you preemptively remove even the possibility of any work on your part. This will not only stir up feelings of unfairness and exploitation, it will also effectively isolate your girlfriend as well as make her feel like the only reason she’s in the relationship is to cook for you and clean up after you.

Tips:

• Reinforce the notion that you won’t be taking responsibility for anything by stating that it’s good she’s cleaning today – you’re going to play basketball with your friends. So, it’s, you know, convenient.
• Leave dirty clothes, half eaten meals and trash strewn about your apartment.
• Just act like you take it for granted (i.e. “You’re going to clean today, right? And can you do fried chicken for dinner? Thanks babe.”)

Use excessive movies and six-season long TV shows like LOST to fill the time you spend with her. This technique successfully combines minimizing eye contact and blocking communication while allowing you to maintain the innocent, harmless appearance of being interested in film or addicted to one of those shows with lots of plot twists. Those shows are pretty cool and so it also like, relieves boredom. Excessive film and TV will create a vacuous hole in the place of what used to be your relationship, as you previously used this time to talk about your feelings and cuddle. It will moreover make both of you less able to open up around each other and instead feel the ‘need’ to quell silence with media, creating a sort of 24/7 mental noise machine that effectively blocks all chances at introspection and emotional discovery.

Tips:

• Download every season of LOST and just get her hooked on it, like a pimp does his whore. Drill new episodes into her head nightly. Pretty soon she’ll be begging for it.
• Use Hulu, PBS.com, and other free streaming video websites.
• Kill yourself.