Sergio TripodoRelationships, identity and everyday philosophy
Morning light through an open door

When love becomes possession: freedom and control

By · Teacher and author

Morning light through an open door

There are relationships that dress themselves in love but breathe domination. They don’t shout, they don’t always wound with words, but slowly they build an invisible cage made of control, expectations and lies. Behind the mask of “us forever” there often lies a deep inability to truly love. The desire to possess the other person – to organise their life, absorb their choices, deny them any elsewhere – is not love, but a subtle and dangerous form of relational toxicity.

Possession in disguise

Many people mistake need for affection, jealousy for passion, manipulation for attention. In reality, the need to control the other springs from an inner emptiness that one does not want to face. Erich Fromm understood this well: in The Art of Loving he distinguishes mature love – founded on freedom and responsibility – from immature love, which seeks in the other a narcissistic compensation, a crutch to keep from falling.

Love, Fromm writes, is not a passing emotion but a capacity that is cultivated. And it can never become a prison or a possession. When we want to “have” the other, we are already losing them as a person: we reduce them to an object, to an extension of our own self.

The fear that builds the cage

The desire for control is often fuelled by the fear of abandonment. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan spoke of manque – the original lack – which drives human beings to seek their own completeness in an Other. But no love can truly fill that void, and when we demand that it should, we fall into a dangerous illusion.

Jung, too, describes relationships in which the other is not seen for who they are, but as a screen onto which we project our shadows, our unresolved conflicts, our childhood fears. And so love becomes symbiotic, greedy, hungry for reassurance.

The poison of lies and appearances

To keep a relationship founded on possession standing, people often turn to another poison: lying. Not only to the partner, but to the outside world. They act out the comedy of the happy couple, they keep up a precarious balance made of silent compromises, imposed sacrifices and truths never spoken. They lie so as not to admit failure, so as not to give up control.

But in this performance, respect for the other’s freedom is lost. So we can ask ourselves: are we building an encounter between two freedoms, or are we letting our fears decide for both of us? When we impose on the other a role, a trajectory, a version of reality, we betray the very thing that should be the heart of love: the possibility of being oneself in the presence of the other, without masks and without chains.

To possess is to deny

Jean-Paul Sartre described the paradox of love forcefully: in trying to “have” the other, we deprive them of their freedom, and so we destroy them as a subject. Authentic love feeds on the tension between desire and freedom. When one of the two gives way, only power remains.

Opposed to this view is the thought of Martin Buber, for whom the authentic relationship is an “I–Thou” encounter, not an “I–It” domination. Whoever truly loves does not swallow up the other, but welcomes them in their irreducible otherness. And as Levinas writes, every attempt to reduce the other to what I want is a form of violence. Even when it is silent.

Living healthy relationships

In a time that Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid”, in which relationships are often fragile, uncertain, consumed by the fear of loneliness and abandonment, it is essential to relearn the art of the authentic bond. A bond that does not erase, does not manage, does not possess. A bond that has no need to hide truths, but feeds on presence, sincerity and autonomy.

We do not love out of fear; we do not hold on out of need. When we realise that the relationship needs lies to stay standing, that we are living with the anxiety of being left or with the arrogance of being indispensable, it is time to stop and ask ourselves: am I loving, or am I using the other so as not to face myself?

A question for you

In your view, what gesture distinguishes care from control? You can leave a reflection in the comments without describing personal situations or identifying other people.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The silence after “Bro, fuck off”

Image
What gets decided in the few seconds when a teacher doesn’t answer First day of lessons with a first-year class. We are still taking each other’s measure: I don’t know their names, they don’t know who I am. A girl is sitting with her back to me. I ask her, kindly, to turn round and not to stay facing away while we’re having the lesson. “Bro, fuck off.” For those who don’t spend their mornings in school corridors: “bro” comes from “brother”. Among teenagers it’s a familiar way of addressing each other, almost a verbal tic. Aimed at a teacher you’ve only just met, and followed by those two words, it becomes something else. It closes the distance and strikes at it in the same moment. I didn’t answer straight away. I stayed silent for a few seconds. It is those seconds I’d like to write about. A sentence said in front of everyone An insult received one to one can sometimes be allowed to drop. In front of a class it’s different, because a class is an audience, and an audience waits...
Read more

Alone, but together: the noise that protects us from silence

Image
It is a late-summer afternoon and the beach is starting to empty. A little further along there is a group of friends I know well: beach umbrellas set close together, a shared cool box, someone loudly telling a story the others have already heard, and everyone laughing as if it were the first time. My son watches them for a while, then turns to me and says, with that disarming naturalness only young people have: “But they can’t stand each other. And yet they’re always together.” I didn’t answer straight away. I had spent a lot of time with that group, gladly and with the kindness I try to show everyone, and I had never really asked myself what held it together. Yet the clues were there. In the confidences I received, each of them had something to say about the others: judgements whispered after a dinner, ironic remarks about whoever had just left, the openly admitted weariness of having to meet up again the following Saturday. And the following Saturday, without fail, everyone met up...
Read more

Longing for a change of scene: does leaving really help?

Image
Tuesday, lunch break. You scroll through your phone and stop at the photos of a former schoolmate who has moved to another city: a window open onto the sea, a bicycle leaning against a wall, a caption about a “new life”. Then you go back to your desk, to the office lighting, to the road you have taken every morning for years. All afternoon one thought stays with you: if I were somewhere else, I would be better off. That thought deserves to be listened to. It may hold a passing weariness, a neglected possibility, something that has long been looking for room. Understanding what it is asking of us is harder. Because in the image of a different life we see at once what we would like to find, and far less what we would bring with us. The window onto the sea is right there, before our eyes. The rest we still have to imagine. Looking at the place where we are Among the writings of the Hippocratic corpus there is one entitled Airs, Waters, Places . In its opening pages, the physician who...
Read more