Anger Management

Anger is natural.  It pumps you up and gets you going to do something physical.    If you are facing an invading army, it is the perfect emotion to feel.    If you are facing a loved, liked, or even tolerated one, anger is the worst thing that can happen to you.   Anger makes you want to hurt your target.  This works fine if your goal is death.  Not so much if you don't want to actually kill them.

Anger makes people win the battle but lose the war.    The mechanism is fairly simple.  Anger gets you to over-commit your resources.  If you spend too much on one battle, you won't have enough to win others later on.

This works for relationships as well as wars.

When dealing with something that makes you angry, my advice is to first go some place and calm down.  Then start thinking about how to achieve your goals WITHOUT hurting anyone you care about. 

It is not a good idea to convince your husband to give up Sunday Football and go shopping with you if he will resent you for it.   Even if he hides the resentment.     It is not a good idea to convince your wife to try a threesome if she doesn't want one.  Even if she orgasms. 

It is better that neither person gets what they want if it means the other is resentful.  You need to find ways to compromise so that BOTH sides end up happy.  Part of that is accepting that your partner may get happy from things that you don't like.  Even things you hate.     To quote Dan Savage "If cake play is what a man needs, his wife should give it to him; if she can’t bring herself to, then maybe she should allow him a chocolate-frosted excursion with another woman." (This was in response to a man who simply wanted his girlfriend to slam a chocolate cake into his face - cake play meant playing with cake, not a euphemism.)

Sometimes you will be in a situation where someone is going to end up resentful no matter what.   One person has family in California and wants to stay there, the other gets a great job offer in Texas.  The trick there is for one person to bribe the other till they think it is worth it.

Maybe offer to use a lot of that extra money to buy a Motorcycle for the one that wants to stay in California (even though the Texas bound person thinks they are too generous).

Note, these techniques also work well in other types of relationships.  Amazing what simply staying calm when talking to an airline can sometimes do.   Of course it requires that both people be reasonable, not always the case.