Are You Compromising or Being Controlled?

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

Growing up the word that I always heard in reference to relationships was compromise. It was everywhere, out of the mouths of people around me offered as advice, in television shows and taught as an essential part of life as a child. Compromise is part of any relationship. It’s the continual negotiating between two people to maintain some sense of harmony and balance in the relationship. The thing about compromise is that it should go both ways. Both people should be happy with the compromise reached, and if one person compromises more this should be acknowledged with a healthy give and take in the relationship. Compromise can blur into control though when a relationship is unhealthy and one partner is not respected. That is what happened with me.

At first I thought I was compromising a lot in my relationship. Doing things I didn’t want to do to make him happy, allowing him to have the final say in activities and pushing aside my wants for him to have his. The thing I soon started to see though is that there was no compromise coming back my way. It was me who was always the one who had to bend. On the times it did seem that he bended he would then come at me over and over again until I was so tense that I would cave into what he wanted. This technique had been used on me by my ex husband as well and I loathed it, yet I still allowed it to happen because I thought ultimately I was compromising. I wasn’t, I was being controlled. The things I wanted were not given no matter how I tried to communicate how important they were to me, even if these were things he promised he would give me, he would tell me he couldn’t do it and just would not bend at all.

The thing about compromise is that no one should ask you to shift your boundaries or your core values. They should not ask you to do something that fires up the alert system in your body that something vital and important to you is being overridden. The moment this happens the person asking you to do this is not respecting who you are as a person, they aren’t asking you to compromise, they are controlling you. Compromise should never infringe on the bigger parts of who you are that you feel are essential to you. Little things like what television show to watch, where to go for dinner or what picture will go on the lounge wall are compromise. Having something hideous on display…