- Tension: We want intimacy and freedom in relationships, but many of our habits try to secure one by sacrificing the other.
- Noise: Pop advice frames relationship health as a list of red flags, ignoring how emotional safety is co-created, not policed.
- Direct Message: To grow emotional intimacy, we need to release control-based habits and co-create trust through curiosity, honesty, and shared vulnerability.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
It’s easy to spot toxicity in someone else’s relationship. Harder to spot in our own. Even harder when it doesn’t look like overt manipulation — but comes dressed as love, care, or even responsibility.
When I studied digital well-being at LSE, I often found parallels between how we use technology and how we relate to each other. Both involve boundaries, attention, and — critically — control. In media narratives, we often celebrate the power couple that schedules everything, monitors everything, and defines every rule. But I’ve come to realize that emotional safety can’t be micromanaged. It has to be felt.
The truth is, many of us enter relationships with habits that were once survival strategies. They helped us manage uncertainty. But over time, they become walls we build to avoid discomfort—walls that quietly erode the intimacy we crave.
This is the value collision: our desire for closeness clashes with our urge to stay in control.
When safety turns into control
We often say we want vulnerability. But what we sometimes actually want is predictability.
We think: if I can just get them to stop doing that, then I can relax. If we just talk every night, or if I always know who they’re with, then I’ll feel secure.
These habits — born from fear, often wrapped in care — can quietly sabotage connection.
Here are eight behaviors that seem small but often signal control, not connection:
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Monitoring their every move online. Checking their likes, comments, or follows. It may seem harmless, but it feeds anxiety more than trust. It turns curiosity into surveillance.
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Fixing their feelings. Jumping in to solve instead of sitting with discomfort. It’s often well-intentioned, but it says: “Your feelings are a problem to fix, not an experience to witness.”
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Keeping score. Whether it’s chores, emotional labor, or attention—tracking who did what breeds resentment. Love can’t breathe in a ledger.
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Preemptive distancing. Withholding affection or acting cold to avoid being hurt first. It creates a cycle where both partners feel unseen.
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Testing loyalty. Saying things just to gauge their reaction. Asking trick questions. It’s not intimacy—it’s emotional poker.
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Overexplaining yourself. Trying to justify every boundary so the other person never feels disappointed. It may look like communication, but it’s fear of disapproval dressed up as clarity.
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Assuming intentions. Interpreting their silences or behaviors through a lens of past wounds. It’s a shortcut to feeling right—but it shortcuts empathy too.
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Needing constant reassurance. It’s okay to need comfort. But if it becomes a cycle of asking and doubting, it can exhaust the bond.
Each of these habits stems from a need — to be seen, safe, significant. But when we prioritize control over co-regulation, we don’t make our relationships safer. We make them tense.
The stories we’re sold about healthy love
Online advice tends to present relationships in stark binary: toxic vs. healthy, red flag vs. green flag. But most dynamics aren’t that clean. And many people end up more confused than before.
Much of the conventional wisdom is designed for virality, not nuance.
Think of the articles and videos: “If they do this, run!” or “These 3 behaviors mean they’re a narcissist.” That framing might help us feel temporarily empowered. But it also trains us to see our partners as threats to manage, rather than people to understand.
When analyzing media narratives around this, I’ve noticed how digital culture favors certainty. The platforms reward hot takes over complexity. That bleeds into how we talk about love: with lists, tests, and checkboxes. It makes sense—ambiguity doesn’t go viral. But love lives in the grey.
And here’s the irony: when we internalize these simplified scripts, we may avoid clear toxicity, yes—but we also dodge the real work of building intimacy.
We become obsessed with catching signs of failure instead of nurturing signals of trust.
Direct message
True emotional intimacy doesn’t come from controlling the relationship—it comes from being willing to risk not controlling it.
Letting go of control-based habits doesn’t mean tolerating chaos or neglect. It means trading micromanagement for mutual presence. Emotional safety is something we create together, not something we enforce on each other.
The core of emotional bonding is not in fixing, proving, or preventing. It’s in co-discovery. It’s in saying, “I want to understand you, even if I don’t like everything I find,” and trusting the other person to do the same.
How to unlearn the urge to control
For many people I’ve worked with through digital wellness programs, the first step is learning to pause. Not every discomfort needs a response. Not every fear is a warning. Sometimes, it’s just a leftover echo.
Here are a few small shifts that move us out of control and into connection:
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Replace monitoring with honest check-ins. Ask how they’re feeling—not what they’ve been doing.
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Swap fixing with witnessing. Sit beside their emotion without trying to pull them out of it.
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Shift from proving your worth to sharing your world. Let go of the urge to be constantly understood and lean into mutual curiosity.
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Reframe silence. Instead of assuming the worst, make space for difference in how people process.
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Build rituals, not rules. A goodnight call can be a comfort when it’s chosen freely—not when it’s demanded.
We’re not meant to feel secure because we control every variable. We feel secure because we trust we’ll be okay, even if we don’t.
We say we want to feel closer.
The real question is: can we tolerate the openness that closeness requires?
