The Control Freak

I was recently explaining my aversion to sleepovers to a new friend. As I desperately tried to convey the importance of sleeping on a satin pillowcase (and the dearth of said pillowcases at men’s houses) to a man with very little hair, he looked at me and shook his head.  “What you need to do,” he intoned “is stop trying to control everything and just enjoy life”.
I agreed with him but thought to myself, “easier said than done”. See I’m a straight-up control freak and pretty much always have been. I’m that girl who walks around with a huge purse with everything she might ever possibly need in it, because God forbid I get caught out there someday without my Tide to Go stick.
In a relationship, my control-freakiness manifests as a laissez-faire attitude. Sounds contradictory, but by asking nothing of my partner I relinquish no control; I don’t make requests whose outcomes are determined by anyone other than myself. This, I realize, is probably not the right balance of power in a relationship. But what is? And do different types of control weigh more heavily than others?
I was once in an unrelationship in which I controlled the purse-strings.  Being a modern woman but yet no fool, I compensated for this imbalance of power by pretending that it didn’t exist. And basically giving up control of all other aspects of our life together. I know that a man needs to feel like a man and it’s difficult to do this when the woman controls the money, but a man who makes all the rules despite the fact that he doesn’t make the money should feel like a king, right? Wrong. No matter what I did to equalize the balance of power in our relationship, that imbalance was always there and was the demise of our relationship.
But should power and control matter in a relationship?  Maybe not, but some people truly can’t help it. We’ve read enough about control freaks and Type-A personalities to know that some people just can’t relax unless they’re holding the reins of something, whether it be which side of the bed they sleep on or the direction their relationship takes. Is this something we have to squelch in order to have a happy home or is it possible to love someone who feels the need to direct every minute aspect of life?
Maybe I’m naïve, but I believe it is. Endless cynic though I may be, I have hope that there are people out there who can tolerate a control freak but still not be too punkish to be desirable. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself.
What say you readers?