Control

Lying in bed at 4 am, I kept circling back to a brief chat that felt like a disagreement from yesterday, something that had been nagging at me all day. Something that made me feel, possibly left her sulking a bit. I spent a while trying to pull the feeling apart thread by thread, partly to understand it better, partly to check whether I was being unreasonable.

What I was really dissecting were three tangled things: expectations, control, and dependence, and where the line sits between the healthy version of each and the unhealthy one. I’ve had more than enough practice with this question by now.

Before we separated for a few months, my wife carried an extreme amount of control into the relationship, expected a strong dependence from me, and layered a lot of expectations on top of both. Not all of it was there from day one. Without ever examining my own behavior closely enough, I ended up germinating a lot of that into her by my own behavior. If I had to name the root of both control and dependence, I’d say it’s expectations. Control is when there is an expectation to embrace someone else’s choices and dependence is relying on someone else’s presence/support.

She’d object to what I chose to eat, even when I was ordering only for myself. If I wanted a burger and she thought Thai curry was the better choice, despite not even being the one eating it, she’d push and persuade and ask why I wasn’t considering the curry instead, to the point of real frustration on both sides. She had strong opinions on whether I used a bucket or a shower, and would argue relentlessly for one over the other, for no reason I could ever pin down. She expected me to mediate every friction between her and my mother. The same things she now does willingly for complete strangers, back then, if my mother asked her to do them, she’d flip out and say she wasn’t comfortable. Now I watch her do those exact things entirely of her own will. She expected me to depend on her for food and cooking, and when I started making my own breakfast and dinner, that hurt her more than almost anything else. I preferred to shop for myself alone, but she expected everything to go through her, and would sometimes push me into buying things that then sat untouched in my cupboard for years before I finally threw them out. I still own two pairs of shoes I’ve never worn, bought only because she insisted, because they were on sale. And there was this constant, recurring need she had for me to simply be around. I never fully understood that one. We’d be in the house together, both busy, exchanging only the transactional stuff, food, kids, logistics, barely a minute spent talking about anything else. She’d be on the phone with friends, watching something on her laptop, and still want me physically present, like my being there was its own kind of reassurance that everything was fine. It surfaced up whenever I traveled for work or stepped out of the house. Whenever I was out late for an office dinner or a late meeting. She backed off when I moved back in, I don’t think the control has gone away but the expectations have certainly been tempered down. It is just that she has learnt to filter it on her own.

Some of this is dependence. Some of it is control. Some of it is healthy. Some of it very much isn’t.

I’d thought about this before too, in a conversation with S, specifically about dependence. I think some amount of dependence is actually good. It draws people closer, pulls them into your life. You consciously let someone do things for you, and that’s not bad reliance, it’s intimacy. I’ve come to accept that I run hyper-independent by default, probably something my own life shaped in me, spent mostly alone, unchecked, unquestioned by anyone. And I actually want to be dependent on the people I love. That’s not the part I’m resisting.

What I’m resisting is control. It usually shows up as “this is for your own good,” and it creates a specific kind of turbulence inside the other person; an unease, an irrational upset the moment they don’t see compliance. I think that reaction is actually the indication. Healthy dependence can hear a no and let it go. Control struggles with it. The motive behind it is almost always framed as love or care, so the motive is never the signal, the reaction is. I’ve struggled with this my whole life; anyone, at work or at home, trying to dictate what I should do triggers the same resistance in me. And maybe my mother’s old habit of pushing my wife into things she now does freely is really just the same pattern of control.

S carries this same instinct to control. She feels the pull to tell me what to do, she has wanted to make me certain decisions previously, and justifies it as love, while never expecting the same kind of decision-making or influence handed back to me. That asymmetry is something I have tried to articulate multiple times. Control that only flows in one direction isn’t dependence, it’s just control, and for me, that’s never sustainable.

One thing I understand about myself much more clearly now: sometimes, love means loving someone with their flaws intact, including the flaw of not listening to you, of continuing to hurt themselves in ways you can see coming, and still being at peace with that contradiction, rather than carrying it around as a low hum of anxiety you have to keep managing.

I’m most compatible with someone who can hold that same space. I try to be that person myself: I’ll say what I think, then let the other person choose, and whatever they choose, I still love them. That’s the trade I’m offering, the same restraint from me that I’d want from them. A symmetric amount of control on both sides, which is really just another way of saying none at all.

The another way to look at this, you can nag a person about an issue that you see or they are dealing with. You can also nag them about a solution to that problem. The both seems interchangable and similar but they are vastly different. One os care, one is control. Asking someone to make a decision to improve something is good, even if it comes across as nagging. Asking someone to do something specific to improve the situation is manifesting that control.

This single trait, more than almost anything else, has quietly dismantled the illusion of love for me in the past, usually faster than I’d like to admit. It was only last night that I finally found the words to say exactly what it was and phrase it to myself.

I want to depend on someone, without being controlled by them. I want to offer dependence in return, without ever controlling them back. That’s the actual model I expect from a relationship. Most of the disagreements that come up trace back to this one axis, and most of them resolve easily enough, once both people understand and expect it clearly.

So much for an early morning epiphany!