Why your attempts to control your partner aren’t working: Losing Strategy #2

My last newsletter was about the 1st Losing Strategy in relationships, which is needing to be right.

Today we take a look at the 2nd Losing Strategy, which is the one where you try to control your partner.

(If you want to see all five losing strategies in one place, download my brief guide to the 5 Losing Strategies).

Remember this is about relationships, and a healthy relationship is not a battle ground or an opportunity for one person to demonstrate their management skills on the other.

And yet it is really common for people to try to control their spouse or partner.

At the mild end, it’s just about the little things such as getting your other half to use less water in the shower or getting them to empty the bins on time.

At the other end of the spectrum we have coercive control, which is definitely a form of abuse. Coercive control includes things like not letting your partner leave the house, depriving them of any source of independent income and dictating what kind of clothes they wear.

Some of us attempt to exert control directly by nagging or shouting. Others go for indirect control via manipulation.

When you say something like “if you really loved me you would…” or “I could be happy if only you’d…” you are engaging in manipulation, i.e. an indirect attempt at control. There is an abusive extreme to indirect control too. It’s called gaslighting.

Why your attempts to control your partner don’t work

The thing is that neither of these ‘strategies’ is effective. Nagging and manipulation engender anger or resentment; gaslighting and coercive control can end up in divorce.

I’m going to confine myself to the less serious end of the spectrum, as I assume you bear no malice to your partner.

There’s a number of reasons why trying to control someone doesn’t work.

• First of all, short of outright coercion, control is an illusion. It is not possible to control anyone’s behaviour without engaging in coercion. So it’s a bit pointless.
• Secondly nobody likes being controlled! So the normal response will be resistance or anger.
• And thirdly it does not take account of the pressures your partner is under or ask the question why he or she is not doing the things you wished they would.

Looked at objectively, this is more than a bit nutty! But when you’re inside that fish bowl, without the perspective of an outsider, you probably believe you are simply encouraging your partner to be more like the kind of person they were when you first fell in love. Unfortunately that's like expecting ice cream to taste like it did when you were three years old.

The trouble with this approach is that when we’re at the beginning of a relationship we are on our best behaviour, and this can be unsustainable as the years pass by, particularly if we start a family. But even when there are no children involved our neurochemistry changes and the flow of chocolates and flowers slows down, and then it’s really easy to get bogged down in the mundanity of everyday life.

As Alex Cutter says in the film, Cutter’s Way, “it’s the daily grind that drives me to drink.”

So if you’re noticing that you’ve been trying to control your partner, don’t be too hard on yourself! You were just doing what billions of other humans have been doing, probably for millennia.

Why we so often end up trying to control each other

There is in fact one central reason why we end up trying to control our partners.

This is the problem inherent in almost every relationship – that we end up with people who replicate the very problems we encountered as children, and which we have been trying so hard to avoid.

When you discover that your partner has got a drink problem, just like your father did, or that she is emotionally unavailable just like your mother was, you experience an overwhelming need to change them back into the wonderful person you fell in love with. And of course you don’t want them to re-enact the challenges you faced as a child.

And that often ends up in attempts to control them.

This isn’t so surprising when you consider that as children we all inevitably developed attachment styles which were exquisitely adapted to the way our parents treated us. And then as adults we look for partners who are a good fit for that attachment style.

Control may be part of the adaptive style you developed as a child to keep you safe. And it still feels like being in control is the only way you can feel safe. But if you're reading this, then it's clearly not working for you.

So if direct and indirect attempts at control don’t work, what does? After all the bins still need to be taken out and the water bill has been too high for too long.

I love the story of the sun and the wind and the man in the overcoat. It’s autumn and a little chilly, but he’s got his coat open. So the wind says to the sun “I bet you I can get that man down there to take his coat off.” The sun’s up for a little game and agrees. The wind blows harder and harder, and all it does is make the man button up his overcoat.

Then the sun comes out from behind the clouds and just shines, nice and warm. Within seconds the buttons are undone and the man has taken off his coat and slung it over his shoulder.

If you’ve noticed that you’ve been indulging in a bit of control-freakery, what might it look like for you to be less like the wind and more like the sun?

If you could use some support in finding a control-free way of handling the differences with your partner, get in touch. You can book a free one-hour Relationship Renewal Clarity Call. It’ll give you a chance to get clear on what’s not working for you, what you want to achieve and what steps you might take towards being more sun and less wind.