Have you ever found yourself thinking, “I need to control my partner” to make our relationship work? If so, you’re not alone, but this mindset is often a losing strategy that can damage intimacy and trust. According to a Relational Life-Trained Therapist, trying to manage or control your partner doesn’t just create distance—it can lead to resentment and diminish the love you both share. In this blog, we’ll explore why controlling behavior is detrimental to relationships and share practical, healthier alternatives that can help you foster a stronger, more connected partnership.
The Second Losing Strategy: Controlling Your Partner
Controlling your partner is a losing strategy in the same way as tyranny; “tyranny always eventually fails. No one thrives when deprived of liberty. Oppressing someone may lead to compliance, but it will never engender health or love” (Real, 2007, p. 47).
When we manage our partner, we deprive our relationship of intimacy. Unless your partner complies with your control, you likely deprive him/her of affection and sex. Generosity reduces, resentment forms and hardens, and love withers away.
Worse still, “for both sexes, when you combine needing to be right with control, you always assume that you know what’s best for your partner better than s/he does. It is always ‘one-up’ [grandiosity] and intrinsically condescending” (Real, 2007, p. 47).
As a reminder, when we see ourselves as better than our partner, in a place of entitlement and grandiosity, we are in a delusional state; none of us are better are worse than anyone else, as we all have the same inherent value. In this delusional state, we are not interested in working things out like a team with our partner; we instead are only interested in our own self-preservation and our own selfishness.
This losing strategy is often particularly seductive and irresistible because, oftentimes, the qualities you’re trying to see in your partner are the ones s/he exhibited in the early phase of your relationship. During the honeymoon phase, in those first roughly 6 months to a year, most of us are on our best behavior. We usually do well in hiding, or at least drastically minimizing, our most flawed traits.
After this period ends, most of us feel increasingly liberated to kick our shoes off and let our worst tendencies surface.
Here is where things become particularly twisted for us: “To understand the allure of control, we need to place it in the context of every relationship’s fall from grace. We all fall in love with someone we think will mend the unhealed places we carry inside, someone who, at the very least, will help us avoid them. And yet, devilishly enough, we all somehow wind up with a partner who is exquisitely designed to stick the burning spear right into our eyeball” (Real, 2007, p. 45).
Had a dad who struggled with alcoholism? You’re likely to learn that discover that despite your partner seemingly being a very responsible alcohol drinker in your first 6 months to a year of dating, that after that time, he somehow struggles just as much as your dad with managing his alcohol intake. Maybe your childhood was filled with tremendous fear, as your mom often displayed tremendous rage. You’re likely to find that your partner, after some time, struggles with a similar temper as your mom.
“We all marry our unfinished business; we all choose our mothers or fathers. We all become our mothers or fathers” (Real, 2007, p. 45).
Our best understanding of how this happens is we all like what we are used to, even if that thing/those things are incredibly toxic and painful. And, due to this, in unconscious ways, we all put our little messages into the world to attract to us the very men/women who will reenact those known/comfortable feelings, thoughts, and experiences. And, on some level, we do this try to heal the oozing wounds left in us from our caregivers’ treatment.
So, to summarize, we often end up unconsciously attracting a partner into our life who will ultimately struggle with some of the same flaws we endured from childhood. Much more common than not, our partner will do a great job of hiding these painful realities from us early in dating, thereby convincing us that s/he is a perfect match. We are misled into believing that, for instance, while dad had a mean streak, our partner of 6 months to a year is the nicest person alive – until that time passes and we are saddened and shocked to learn, s/he has a similar mean streak as well.
Then, having seen a 6 month to 1 year or so glimpse of the nicest man/woman in the world, we go on a mission to control our partner, to contort him/her back into being that endlessly and perfectly nice human we thought s/he was at his/her core.
When we get triggered in our relationships, for those you learned this losing strategy of trying to control our partner, our largest and first instinct is to do everything we possibly can to get our partner to behave. “Our understandable, naïve, and utterly dysfunctional dream is that our partners will give to us whatever we most missed in our childhood, that which we most yearn for now as adults:
• For him to be kind if your father was harsh.
• For her to be honest if your mother was manipulative.
• For him to be emotionally available if both your parents were distant.
The deeper the pain, the more we are triggered, and the more desperate we are to control the situation. We feel a knee-jerk response to make a partner responsible, to get him to stop being so angry, or win back the attentiveness he showed at the start” (Real, 2007, p. 46).
The reality about all of this and control is this: it’s an illusion. Control simply doesn’t work. “Without a gun to someone’s head, no one ‘gets’ anyone to do anything” (Real, 2007, p. 46).
“Whether it’s direct or indirect, bullying or benevolent, control is always a losing strategy. Even if you succeed in getting your way, you have won the battle but lost the war. Whether your partner shows it or not, no one likes to be controlled. Unless your mate is a happy masochist, he will either rebel eventually, or else settle into a lifetime of resentful martyrdom. In either case, you can count on payback” (Real, 2007, p. 47).
Second Winning Strategy: Clearly, Firmly, and Kindly Present the Consequences. Present it All as a Choice. Present it Not as What Your Partner Must Do, but Rather, What You Are Going to Do.
With healthy parenting, we cannot ever tell a child what s/he can and cannot do. If we try, that child will fight back and assert how uncontrollable s/he is. According to Relational Life Therapy, instead, we clearly, firmly, and kindly present the consequences. “Yes, you can choose to hit your little sister. I can’t stop you. But, if you do that, this is the consequence you’ll face. It’s up to you”.
So too in healthy adult relationships, we should also clearly, firmly, and kindly present consequences. “You don’t have to go to rehab. The choice is up to you. I can’t force or control you into going. You are your own person. If you don’t go to rehab, the result is I am going to pack my things and leave”.
Said differently, you don’t tell your partner what s/he must do; you tell him/her what you are going to do.
Remember, to put ourselves in a position in our relationships to be much more likely to be heard and get our needs met, we focus on ourselves – instead of our partner.
Some examples:
• I feel upset when there’s a lot of yelling. It can feel really intense for me and shut me down. I need us to work on bringing things up in a calmer way and doing our best to stay calm as we talk things out.
• I feel really exhausted when there’s so much drinking and broken promises. I need a partner I know I can depend on to follow through on his word consistently. Without that, I need us to be in couples’ therapy by next Tuesday at 3.
Interested in Understanding More about this Losing Strategy of Needing to Control Your Partner and What to do Instead?
Are you tired of feeling like your partner really wishes s/he married someone else? S/he keeps telling you what s/he needs from you and it feels like s/he is asking for you to be a completely different person? Or, maybe, as you read this article, you feel you have trouble with wanting to control your partner? Either way, we can help.
At Stress Solutions, we can teach you and your partner more about how this losing strategy of needing to control your partner found its way into your lives. We can show you two how to say no to it and to develop and practice alternative and much healthier, winning strategies that will protect your relationship from a lot of resentment, will foster generosity between you two, and will therefore make it infinitely more likely you two get your relational needs met. We encourage you to call us your free phone consultation with a therapist at Stress Solutions, located in San Diego, California. We devote our lives to helping couples like you to learn about the common losing strategies that make up our relationship culture, the critical need to notice and challenge them, and practice healthier ways to get the relationships and lives you deserve.
