A healthy relationship is built on love, support, and mutual respect, but sometimes the lines between care and control can become blurred. Recognizing when affectionate gestures cross into controlling behavior is crucial for maintaining a balanced partnership. This list investigates different signs that may indicate a partner’s actions are more about control than genuine care, helping you identify potential red flags in your relationship.
Keeping Tabs on Your Social Media
Keeping tabs on your accounts and browsing history is often masked as building trust in your relationship, but this can lead to monitoring and controlling your digital life. Psychology Today says, “It’s a violation of your privacy, hand-in-hand with the unsettling message that they have no interest in trusting you and instead want to take on a police-like presence within your relationship.”
Always Wanting to Hold Your Hand
Insisting on physical contact when in public might feel like a sign of love, but it may be a way to keep you close and monitor your behavior. Not letting go, even when it’s impractical, restricts your freedom and subtly directs your movements.
Laughing Off Your Opinions
Making light of your choices or preferences may be used by controlling partners to gradually undermine your confidence in decision-making. It might start out as playful, but it can become a way to criticize your interests or dismiss your self-awareness.
Surprising You by Showing Up
Sometimes sold as a romantic surprise, partners might turn up unexpectedly at work or social gatherings in order to check on your whereabouts or monitor your interactions. They might join outings when not invited, saying they want to spend more time together, but this behavior invades your personal life and crosses boundaries.
Taking Care of Your Finances
Offering to manage your budget, making comments on your spending, and giving you money rather than letting you control your own are all signs of financial control in a relationship. Money Helper says this kind of abuse “involves someone else controlling your spending or access to cash, assets, and finances. This can leave you feeling isolated, lacking in confidence, and trapped.”
Gifting You Things You Didn’t Ask For
Although a gift can be a genuine sign of appreciation or love, when the gifts are clothes or items you wouldn’t normally choose, it might be an attempt to influence your appearance and preferences. They might also claim to ‘upgrade’ your existing items with their own choices, but this subtly erases your identity.
Suggesting Changes “For Your Own Good”
They might seem concerned about your health and offer help with your diet or exercise, or make suggestions about your career, but partners who do this are imposing their own preferences onto you and undermining your sense of yourself.
Dismissing Your Accomplishments
Controlling partners often want to reduce your self-esteem and confidence so that you rely on them more. By playing down your achievements or taking the credit for themselves, they are reinforcing the idea that you couldn’t succeed without them.
Showing Jealousy in “Cute” Ways
It might begin as teasing or lighthearted joking, but serious accusations about your behavior with others can become a way to isolate you from friends. According to WebMD, “Even if they have past traumas from other relationships, they shouldn’t project those emotions onto you.”
Always “Rescuing” You
Another way controlling partners might try to make you dependent on them is to offer unsolicited help with challenges or problems, appearing supportive but actually preventing you from handling your own situations. They might claim they’re doing this to lighten your load, but these actions foster dependency and knock down your confidence in yourself.
Making Jokes About You
It might seem like fun, but making private jokes about you can belittle you or purposefully highlight your mistakes. This might come in the form of regularly talking about embarrassing things you’ve done in the past to make you feel self-conscious or using nicknames that you don’t like.
Clinging to You
Texting you nonstop to say they miss you or insisting on coming along to appointments with you might seem romantic, but this behavior infringes on your personal life. BRIDES notes that insecure attachment can be one reason someone displays clinginess.
Constantly Wanting to Know Your Every Move
Frequent checking-in messages might seem sweet or protective, but wanting to know your whereabouts and asking for details of your day can become controlling. You might notice it becomes a necessity for them to know what you’re up to, or they might question you about why you went somewhere; at this point, it’s time to have a conversation about boundaries.
Preferring All Your Time Be Spent Together
Controlling partners often try to isolate you from others, wanting to spend all your free time together, just the two of you. According to Psych Central, this can be seen in subtle ways, such as tuning out of conversations when you talk about others, or in more obvious ways, such as putting your loved ones down or complaining when you spend time with others.
Making Decisions for You
What might start as fashion advice or claiming to know your tastes well may evolve into controlling your appearance, what you eat, and how you spend your time. Controlling partners might do this to shape you into the partner they want or to restrict your independence.
Public Displays of Affection to Mark Territory
Excessive PDA in front of your friends may seem like a show of love, but it might be used as a signal to others that you are ‘taken.’ This might also be carried out online by constantly sharing images or videos of you in order to demonstrate that you are ‘theirs’.
Planning Your Future Together, Non-Stop
It’s great when partners show commitment to relationships, but when they make long-term plans without consulting you, they are assuming your goals and ideals. They might discuss your future plans at length but not leave room for your input, or they might set a timeline for your life milestones that they pressure you with.