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4 Ways A Controlling Personality Silently Erodes A Relationship

A person who suffers from a controlling personality will often subconsciously reason to themselves that if they can control they partner, it will make that relationship more secure. They think it will prevent their partner from leaving them or cheating on them with someone else.

This is faulty thinking.

The problem is that controlling behaviour destroys a relationship in all manner of ways which the controller never envisions. In this article I’m going to cover 4 hidden ways a relationship is slowly eroded into nothingness by controlling behaviour.

How A Controlling Personality Silently Erodes A Relationship

The following may be silently killing your relationship right now if you or your partner is overly controlling of the other.

  1. Interference With A Healthy Sex Life: A key function of sex in a relationship is as a means of building intimacy in the relationship. However some controlling individuals will cut off sex with their partner if they don't comply with their demands. This changes the role of sex in the relationship from an intimacy building mechanism …to a “reward for giving in”. This will quickly send sex in the relationship down the tube.
  2. Control Involves Criticism: In order to control someone in a relationship, you will inevitably have to criticize them. And nothing kills intimacy in a relationship quicker than criticism. John Gottman places criticism as #1 in his list of predictors for predicting if a marriage will end in divorce. His book “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” can predict divorce with a 90% accuracy rate you should probably listen to him. Criticism is a terrible way to get a positive behaviour change in a person. Any short-term gain will be offset by a slow build-up of resentment.
  3. Build-Up Of Resentment: No matter how easy going or supplicating the other person in a relationship might be, if he or she is constantly being bossed in the relationship by their partner they will slowly but surely build up resentment towards them. Resentment is a relationship killer. So while the controller might feel secure if they are controlling their partner, they are often actually shooting themselves in the foot without realising it and actually weakening the relationship through their controlling behaviour.
  4. Annihilation Of Respect: If someone is controlling you, it’s difficult for you to have respect for that person. Likewise, if someone is easily able to control someone, it is difficult for them to respect the person they are controlling. Respect is key to a relationship. If any one partner (or both) does not respect the other, the relationship will struggle to survive. Control destroys respect.

Control Transforms A Romantic Relationship Into A Master-Slave Relationship

Ultimately, if one person is constantly bossing the other person around in a relationship, technically it is no longer a romantic relationship at all but a master-slave relationship. And this is not a relationship at all in any romantic sense of the word.

So, controlling behavior in effect causes the relationship to cease even though the two people might physically be together and give the appearance of a “relationship” to others around them.

If your partner is controlling you in your relationship, there are things you can do. Firstly, you need to find out the underlying causes that has caused this person to become controlling in the first place. If you can find out the root cause of a behaviour in a person, and find a way of fixing that root cause, you can fix the symptoms that the root problem is causing.

In this case, the symptom is the controlling behaviour. The root cause might be:

  • Insecurity
  • A controlling parent in their past
  • Or any other number possible variables.

In my book "THE LOVEMAP CODE: How To Make Someone Fall In Love With You Using Psychology", I include a bonus manual called "The Lovemap Disc" that shows you how to analyse the personality type of a dominant controlling individual in order to neutralize the root cause of their controlling behavior in order to make that person fall in love with you. 

Also, check out my article “4 Little-Known Reasons Why Some Women Are So Controlling (And how to control them back!)” for more advice on this. The advice in that article can apply to both men or women who have a controlling personality.