Tag: break-up

Guest Post: 7 Reasons Your Relationship Is Doomed

Feel like you’re in a relationship that’s going south quickly? Get that sinking feeling every time you wake up next to your partner and realize they’re still there? You may be in a doomed relationship. There are many things that make a relationship go from sweet to sour: from trust issues to communication difficulties, here are seven reasons it’s time to call it quits.

1. The green-eyed monster. Jealousy rears its ugly head in almost all human relationships. But sometimes it becomes an overpowering emotion, threatening to destroy even the most solid partnerships. If you feel pangs of envy every time your partner gets a text, or goes out for a night ‘with the guys’, this may be a sign that jealousy is ruling your relationship.

2. Picking fights. I have friends – a couple – who are almost always fighting. They’re constantly bickering about who left the lights on or who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning. No matter who they’re with, or what they’re doing, they’re always nitpicking ─ constantly trying to get ‘one up’ on each other. It’s exhausting for them, and for everyone around them. They claim to love each other deeply but it would appear they love fighting with each other more.

3. Too much time alone… If you feel like you never see your partner; like one of you is always leaving as the other comes home, then perhaps your relationship is falling apart because you’ve forgotten how to be with your partner. If you don’t make time to spend with one another – time other than sleeping or watching TV silently on the couch – your relationship can’t grow.

4. …and too much time together. Perhaps you’re feeling suffocated by spending too much time with your partner. Maybe you begin every sentence with “We…” instead of “I…”. Maybe you spend every moment you’re not together texting each other gross, overly affectionate texts that say “Miss you honeybear”. If any of these sound familiar, maybe you need to get some hobbies, or get out more.

5. You hate each other’s friends. There’s always one person in your partner’s circle of friends who’ll rub you the wrong way. Maybe it’s the tacky girl who keeps asking when he’s going to put a ring on it, or that douchey guy who stares at your boobs. But if you can’t find a way to get along with anyone of each other’s friends, it may be time to re-evaluate the relationship. (Or get new friends.)

6. It’s not working in the bedroom. You can’t fake chemistry. If you and your partner are having troubles in the bedroom, it may be because you’re not communicating. Or it may just be because your lover doesn’t know what he or she is doing. While most couples won’t have truly equal sex drives, being in a relationship should be a good guarantee that you’ll get some action at least once in a while. If that’s not happening, it may be time to pack your bags.

7. You want totally different things. You may find yourself in a relationship that has all the chemistry and passion of a Hollywood movie, but little of the companionship and compatibility that defines a great, long-lasting relationship. And you may just find yourself wanting totally different things than your partner – whether it’s more kids or more romance.

There’s nothing wrong with admitting that it’s just not working. And for your next relationship, try to aim for compatibility over chemistry. Using an online dating service like eHarmony Canada means that you can browse the profiles of people with whom you really connect.

October 10, 2012
7 Reasons foursquare And I Are Over

If you have been a reader of 7 Reasons for a while now, you may remember that at the beginning of August, I (that’s me, Jon) decided to sign up to the new social media kid on the block that is foursquare. It didn’t start too well and as you may recall I predicted foursquare and I were going to have a tricky relationship. Now, I’m sure you’ve been wondering how on earth we are getting on. Well, seven weeks on, we catch up with myself and foursquare to find out.

1. Neglect. To be fair, there has been little contact or indeed effort from either party. I haven’t logged into my foursquare account once since I joined and foursquare hasn’t once bothered emailing me to ask why I have not logged into my account since I joined. Evidently we both have better things to do with our time. I certainly do. Playing with my hair etc.

2. Affair. We both had one. In fact, for the past seven weeks I have been having regular threesomes with twitter and facebook. They seem to like it and I feel strangely clean about the whole thing, so it’s win win. You may have a different point of view, but before you judge me and accuse me of being dirty, may I remind you that foursquare has three million users plugged into her. Potentially all at the same time.

3. Financial Resentment. It’s not that fact that I mind foursquare being worth $80 million – which on latest calculations is just quite a way over $79 million more than I am – it’s the fact that they flaunt it. ‘Woohoo!’ they shout. ‘Come and invest in me!’ There is just no need for it. I don’t go running up and down the street shouting, ‘Woohoo! Come and pay off my student loan!’ do I? No, I don’t. I’d get some very funny looks from some very funny looking cats.

4. Bullying. This one is on me. I put the foursquare app into my iPhone social media folder – yes, I have one of those because I am a hipster – and then I teased it. By this I don’t mean I played hide and seek with it – although I suppose I did in a way everytime I put my phone in my pocket – but I kept hovering my finger over it and then chose twitter or facebook instead. Did I feel bad? Not really. The foursquare icon never said, ‘Touch me baby’. Aesthetically speaking.*

5. Nagging. Not by me. But by foursquare. It forever wanted to know where I was. ‘What are you doing? Where are you doing it? Why are you doing it? How are you doing it? Oooh, I wouldn’t have done it like that’. Just shut up and go away. This is my life and I will do whatever I like, where I like it, for seven of my own reasons, in a manner I feel happy with. Unless my girlfriend or my mum tell me otherwise.

6. Sexual Incompatibility. I won’t go into this too much, but I was rubbish. To be honest, my heart wasn’t in it. And, if it was, I’d have been doing it very, very wrong indeed. I know that much.

7. Realisation. Mark Zuckerburg. You know the guy, he created that facebook thing. Last week his company opened up the world of ‘places’ for all facebook users. So now we can tell all of our ‘friends’ just where we are. As a result I now know when friend A is at work, when friend B is on the platform at a certain train station and when friend C is on the toilet. Quite frankly, this is all too much information. And it is exactly the kind of thing foursquare specializes in. As disappointing as this will sound, the truth is, I really don’t care where you are or what you’re doing – unless you owe me a lot of money. And to be honest, I only have time not to care once. Consequently I have decided not to care via the medium of facebook and thus shall be shutting my foursquare account down with immediate effect.

*My finest oxymoron yet.

September 23, 2010
7 Reasons I Don’t Care About Cheryl Bloody Cole

1. Thug. The nation loves Cheryl Cole, so we are told. Do we? I don’t. I’m quite sure that Sophie Amogbokpa doesn’t – that’s the toilet attendant and part-time law student that Cheryl Cole was convicted of assaulting in a nightclub toilet in 2003. The judge at the trial wasn’t particularly taken with her either, criticizing her for having “…showed no remorse whatsoever.” That’s at least three people who don’t love Cheryl Cole. I’m pretty sure my cat doesn’t like her either.

2. Heartbreak. We’ve spent the last two weeks reading about how heartbroken Cheryl Cole is over her husband’s dalliances and now newspapers are reporting that she has a new boyfriend. That’s not heartbreak, it’s not even heartslightlybent or heartatinyweenybitchipped. We can’t blame her for this though, we’ve got an insatiable media hungry for any new angle on this story – it’s selling a lot of newspapers, after all. Poor Cheryl is obviously being exploited by them. After all, if she knew that her every move was being scrutinized by the media, would she entertain a man in her hotel room until 4am? Of course not, unless she wanted to wring yet more publicity out of the story…oh, silly me.

3. America. After the Ashley Cole phone-text-photo story broke earlier this month, Cheryl Cole went off to America to spend some time away from the media spotlight, choosing as her destination the quiet, secluded backwater of Los Angeles. Purely coincidentally, this is where most US television executives are based. Did you know that Cheryl is being considered as a judge on the American X Factor, which Simon Cowell will be launching there next year? How propitious that she should find herself in a town full of television executives – who may not have heard of her previously – at the very moment she has an enormous press-pack following her every move.

4. Attractiveness. Another popular myth about Cheryl Cole is that everyone finds her attractive. This is not true, I don’t. I find her flawless face, small, perky nose and large, almond-shaped eyes a bit weird to be honest. She has the perfect, symmetrical, neotenous visage of a Disney character. Is this really something grown-ups find attractive? Not me. I don’t fancy Cheryl Cole and I don’t fancy Pocahontas. Nor do I lust after The Little Mermaid.

5. Ashley. Whatever you think of Ashley Cole and the way he conducts himself, it’s hard to fault him over the way he’s conducted himself since the story broke. He’s kept quiet about it. He’s just shut up and got on with trying to recover from his ankle injury in time for the World Cup. I’ll level with you, I can’t stand Ashley Cole. I think that the revelations that emerged a couple of years ago – that he cheated on his wife and paused during sex with a girl he’d met at a nightclub, so he could throw up on her bedroom floor, before resuming sex – show an appalling lack of respect for his wife, his marriage, women in general, and carpets. He is obviously a foul and abhorrent rotter. So when Ashley Cole is the one setting the example of how to behave decorously in the face of the media onslaught over the break-up, something is seriously wrong.

6. Cynicism. You can call me cynical but…actually, forget the but, you can call me cynical – I can live with that. I find the whole media obsession with the Coles a bore, and I find Cheryl’s manipulation of that interest exploitative and wholly self-serving. I may have a very cynical view of the whole thing, but it’s nothing when compared to the cynicism with which she is wringing every last bit of sympathy and publicity from the coverage.

7. Does anyone else care? Okay, I have just spent a good bit of time thinking about it, and a fair amount of time writing about it, but I don’t actually care about Cheryl Cole or Ashley Cole (except during England matches), I’m just annoyed by all of the media coverage that their break-up is generating. I’m sure that there are far more important events happening in the world than the break-up of a thug who can’t sing and a footballer who can’t keep his trousers on, I just don’t know what they are because the news agenda is dominated by this non-story. Perhaps something is happening in Haiti, the Falklands, Madeira, parliament, Afghanistan or Northern Ireland. Who knows?

Do you care about Cheryl and Ashley Cole’s break-up? If so, please tell me why via the comments section, as I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something I’m missing.

February 24, 2010