If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
—Henry David Thoreau
’Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes.
—Miguel de Cervantes
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, a man is shown into a nicely appointed hotel room, where he is eventually joined by two others. He understands that he has died and that this is Hell, but there are no obvious means to torment him. Increasingly irritated by interactions with his companions, he comes to realize that the punishment in this place is simple human interaction. No flames, no boiling oil—just the constant presence of other people. This is torment enough. Sartre, it appears, was not much of an extrovert.
Time for a thought experiment. Mentally list five standout occasions when you were particularly unhappy. Go on. I’ll wait.
Now, how many of those situations involved the behavior, presence, absence, or loss of other people?
If you are like the majority, the answer is either “most of them” or “all of them.” Social relations are complex, shifting, and impermanent. This makes them potential wellsprings of both happiness and misery. Want to change how you feel? Change how you relate to others.
In this section, then, let’s list some of the more potent strategies for creating unhappiness via our relationships. One proviso: I have chosen to bypass a particularly rich vein of possibility—romantic and marital relationships (some see the two as mutually exclusive)—simply because they are so rife with ways to feel worse. No point in shooting fish in a barrel. Besides, some readers are not in such relationships, and it is preferable for all of the strategies in the book to be universally applicable, or as close to that lofty goal as can be achieved. For those wishing to manufacture relationship hell, however, do not despair. Most or all of the techniques listed in this section are easily utilized in the service of turning a perfectly good relationship into misery, abandonment, or both.