Published Articles
By Dr. William R. Morrow

“How to Create Stress in a Relationship ”

The hang-in-there close relationships with your mate are a golden opportunity for stress overload. The weird science-theory which I am touting is this: if you know how to create stress, then you can learn how to remove it, too. Better you should learn from experience. So, right after you shoot yourself in the foot several times in a row, you will get your own attention. Otherwise, you will have to be in psychoanalysis for fifteen years.

As a result of self-generated painful experiences, you can gradually extract a few instructive thoughts out of the swampy mire of your back mind, labeled: Mysterious Unconscious Motivations. Those hard knocks you accumulate eventually yield a theme, the way recurring dreams do. Remember, you did not learn everything there was to know about relationships in kindergarten. My recommendation: put this paradoxical stress-inducing theory into practice. It will make you smarter about relationships.

The first way to add stress to a relationship is to pick someone to meet your needs who is unlikely to be able to respond to you. Line up all the potential candidates, and choose on the basis of something irrational , like nice hair. This way your idealizations will be sure to exceed reality, and you will be mystified as well as disappointed. Does this sound like a parody of love? It is only because mate choosing has nearly as many traps as an Afganistan golf course.

As the relationship "progresses", and grows ever more intimate, you will begin to squint your eyes and start viewing this person across the table as the Great Loving Creature you always wanted. Once you mentally transport him/her, wispy-like, into the realm of Specialness, the expectations naturally grow, like gestating fruit flies. This is not because your mate won't grant you love, but because they didn't realize when it was that you had morphed your partner into the magical role of your sole love-supplier. It is like the saying, "You only hurt the one you love". Or my version, "You only hurt once you START loving". This confounding development is different from falling in love, and more subtle. It is primed and loaded from the time, when you were little, that your mother brought you a glass of water in the middle of the night. She just knew! And you knew you were loved. It is a sure-fire stress producer to think your mate will behave in this supernatural way. Instead, mates will be highly stressed by their failed attempts to guess what you want from them. You will be stressed as well because you can't figure out where the love went. Perfect learning opportunity!

Another good stress producer is garbled communication about day-to-day relationship maintenance. Drive your partner crazy by pretending to tell them your feelings, while secretly telling them your opinion: "I feel that you are ignoring me" is a high-stress zinger because it will put your mate on the defensive, while at the same time puzzling him/her about where you are really coming from. This is really effective because your mate thinks he/she should have picked up on some feeling stirring in your gut. But meanwhile, they have a faint and fuzzy sensation of their own that there is an accusation some place in the room. Instead of being open to responding to your plight, they are so stressed that they can only take flight or fight. Now both of you are truly in pain.

You will know when you have had enough. That's when conscious awareness starts to prod you into smarter relationship behavior.

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