The Fallacy of Control
Relationships are difficult. There I said it.
Whether you practice monogamy or are in an ethically non-monogamous (ENM) relationship, I’ve found that successfully relating to other people in the long term is just hard. It’s hard with one other partner, and it’s hard when you have multiple partners.
Navigating healthy relationships requires emotional intimacy, vulnerability, effective communication, personal boundaries, conflict management, an ability to deal with uncertainty and fear, and compromise.
When you look at yourself, how many of these skills did you receive education on while growing up? How have you learned these relationship skills?
The answer to those questions for me was zero. There wasn’t a “life skills” class that was part of any required curriculum in school (though there really should be). And my parent’s relationship certainly wasn’t an ideal role model of how to healthily do most of these things either.
Instead, learning most of these skills in my own life has been a matter of trial and error. Lots of errors. And sadly, those errors have cost me and have caused harm to people that I loved.
But the thoughts I have running through my head today aren’t focused on all of those areas. No.
This week has provided more opportunities for growth in one specific area of my relationships…how do we deal with our own fears and uncertainties in our relationships in a more healthy manner?
Facing Fears and Uncertainty
I need to rewind a little bit, so let me go back about six months when my wife said that she would like to open our relationship more fully.
Personally, I’ve considered myself to be polyamorous (having lived openly in ENM for about 8 years). My wife though has always been more monogamous leaning, and our own journey of opening up had always been taken at her pace.
Prior to this point, we considered ourselves and our marriage to be ENM, though our relationship was certainly more monogamish which meant that we typically played together as a couple as that was where her comfort zone was.
We’d just left a play party where we’d had a great time, and she was feeling the energy of the connections she’d been making over the months. In that moment of glow and self-confidence, she was brave and said that she would like to discuss opening our relationship more fully so that we could play with others independently of each other. She would like to have the autonomy to more fully explore the connections that she was making.
Despite my own identity as a polyamorous person, this change was unexpected and was not currently the agreed framework for our relationship. So it only took a matter of minutes for my monkey brain to kick in and for my own head to start filling with fear and uncertainties from her request.
Should her ask have been a big deal for me? Logically, no. But logic and emotion don’t always align.
This was all something that I am familiar with, and have actually lived. But in that moment, my emotional brain simply lost its shit (that’s right, even experienced polyamorous people face jealousy, fears and insecurities).
And over the next 3–4 weeks I really struggled with a lot of questions:
- Why was this request coming now?
- Was she unhappy with our current framework?
- What happens if her opportunities for connection require going out on dates? What happens when those dates turn into more dates?
For a period of time, my brain just kept cycling through different “what if” scenarios and trying to make sense of the outcomes. Some of those outcomes were no big deal items, and some of them were felt like potential catastrophic relationship-ending projections.
Responding to Fear and Uncertainty
As I processed through all of these feelings, I wondered how well we as humans are designed to actually face our fears and insecurities. Aren’t our primal responses to fears and uncertainty fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Uncertainty in relationships can create feelings of anxiety and feelings of insecurity in the relationship. And these feelings can often lead us to push our partners away which is exactly contrary to the connection and security that we desire.
So how do we deal with this?
I’m not proud to admit it, but the initial thoughts and reactions that I had when facing my own fears and insecurities were initially to “lock that shit down.”
Because I felt like the change was unexpected and initiated outside of me, my first gut response was to create rules and agreements that would define what was allowed, what would be okay, what would continue to keep me and my relationship safe.
Isn’t this strategy of control what a lot of people do?
The Sense of Control is a False Illusion
After the first 48 hours, once the initial feelings of unexpectedness subsided, I actually felt gross.
I felt gross about how I responded and how my brain initially responded.
The reality is that I am fiercely autonomous. I like being in charge of my own person and decisions, and I want that same autonomy for others. I also have a disdain for rules and agreements because they often feel like controls — attempting to control another person, attempting to control an outcome, attempting to control things to provide emotional security. And I don’t like the feeling that I am being controlled by others.
And in those realities and values, it became clear to me...
You can’t control the behavior of others, but you can always choose how you respond to it.
The only thing in life that I have control over is myself. I can control my actions. I can control my own responses. Nothing more.
I can’t control other people. I can’t control their actions. I can’t control their feelings and emotions. I can’t control the uncertainties in life.
And the reality is that I didn’t want to attempt to control my wife or her actions. I didn’t want to limit her autonomy and more than I want my own autonomy limited. I didn’t want to implement additional rules or agreements as they don’t do anything other than provide a false sense of security. In fact, my own experience with rules and agreements like this is that they often end up either creating resentments or getting broken and causing trust issues — both of which are much bigger issues for the relationship than the initial fears and insecurities.
So what was I left with?
Trust and Personal Boundaries
The reality was that I had to drop my own pretense that I actually had control of anything more than myself (and that was in itself vulnerable and scary).
However, there were really two things that I needed to continue to do.
- I have to trust in my partner(s).
- I have to trust that my partner(s) are coming from a place of good intentions.
- I have to trust that my partner(s) want to be in a relationship with me and want to continually do the work required to keep the relationship healthy.
- I have to trust that my partner(s) are going to care for me and my heart.
2. I also need to establish, communicate, and uphold my own personal boundaries.
- What do I need to feel secure in my relationships?
- What do I need to feel safe in my relationships?
- What behaviors do I need from my partners to feel valued?
- What am I willing and not willing to accept from others?
- What am I willing to do if these boundaries are not honored or met?
And the amazing part is that when I dropped my pretense of control, is that the uncertainties and fears for me just “disappeared.”
The fears and insecurities didn’t actually go away, but the anxiety from the concern of what could happen was replaced with a certainty that they are not happening right now. And my own boundaries and actions are focused on manifesting the outcomes that I actually wanted.
In the nearly six months since we started this journey, I continue to focus on what I can control. And have stopped stressing over what I can’t.
