Countdown to Valentine's day #4 - Neuroticism, the hemlock of all relationships.

Neuroticism is the tendency to be affected easily by negative events. Neurotic people get anxious, angry and depressed easily by seeming the smallest events that happen to them. Neuroticism is the great poison in relationships and one should be wise to learn to detect neuroticism in others.

In the context of filtering people like stocks, neuroticism is the equivalent of a bad management team. Bad management destroys value and sometimes it's worth avoiding a bargain stock if the management is corrupt or beyond redemption. Similarly neuroticism is the destroyer of marriages. A marriage can barely survive a neurotic husband but can rarely be sustained if there is a neurotic wife.

Sometimes you find a hot-looking chick in SDN and wonder what's wrong, the answer is possibly that she's neurotic, once you confirm this, run. Leave the country, even cut your balls off, because even good looks cannot save a relationship with a neurotic woman.

Neuroticism in men not as destructive, but neurotic men develop a tendency to handicap themselves and put obstacles ahead of themselves to avoid failure to protect their self-esteem. These people pretend to working on something but often will never achieve anything in life because they are so afraid of failure.

You have been warned.

Signs of a neurotic personality :

a) Somehow attracted to the colour black.
b) Gets irritable if the air-con fails.
c) Tries to defend poor exam scores by saying that they did not work hard on the test anyway.
d) Gets a physical headache when you say stuff that upsets them.
e) Violent, aggressive behaviour when given poor treatment in a restaurant ( Guilthy as charged ! )
f) Disappears for weeks after a personal setback.
g) Defensiveness when asked to produce results on paper.

If you are a neurotic male, wake up your ideas. Your self-esteem is worth squat in the bigger scheme of things and no one really cares if you succeed or fail. But at least you are not really a bane in relationships.

If you are neurotic female, give up ! Do not even use your good looks as a consolation because of the countless husbands who will be destroyed by you once they go ROM with you. Better stay single to eliminate the neurotic gene from the human race.

Anyway, this sums up the three traits to look for in a long-term relationship. We will discuss some special issues with personality traits as we move towards VD in the next two days.

Happy Valentine's Day !