Demand vs Inspiration: Control and Freedom in Intimate Relationships

Naila Masom, Staff Psychotherapist

When couples come into therapy, it’s often with a wish for the other person to be different in some way. To show more affection, to take more initiative, to socialize differently. These wishes are often communicated through the language of “needs,” which makes them hard to dispute. If your partner needs something from you, isn’t it your job to see it through?

Explicit requests can be part of a healthy relationship. Some couples come to therapy to learn how to communicate needs more effectively. But some things are not needs another person can fulfill without fundamentally changing.

In chronically demanding relationships, one partner’s default is dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustration, banking on the other to change; while the other’s default is anticipation of what’s wanted from them. (These roles can flip).

No one is happy in this situation. The first partner starts to sense the second’s fearful, anticipatory orientation, and their frustration peaks when the second asks, what do you want me to do? And the other person is too distant from their own desire to offer anything else.

This dynamic is the consequence of one person using demand as a shortcut to intimacy, and the other using compliance as a substitute for responsiveness.

Making a demand of another person asks for compliance. Inspiring another person creates an opportunity for them to show themselves in response to you.

Chronically demanding relationships are often the result of deluding ourselves into thinking someone else can be the primary source of our own security. When we do this, we treat our partners as projects, as objects for our own ends, and lose sight of the people they are beyond the relationship.

Psychiatric diagnostic language is a frequently recruited accomplice to this kind of projecting (projecting and project-ing). A diagnosis is often talked about as existing outside of a person, rather than as something intrinsic to and ingrained in their psyche. This framing can sound compassionate, placing the problem in the disorder rather than the person (”it’s not him, it’s his ADHD”).

But what are we really saying when we say his ADHD? His way of relating, of organizing his life, of experiencing focus? Just because certain behaviors can be understood as symptoms of a particular category doesn’t mean they are not part of a person.

What is the focus of the project, and who is heading it?

Attempts to control another person through demand are self-defeating. We don’t want to tell someone what to do, we want them to want to do it.

Of course there’s a spectrum. If I ask my partner to massage my feet, it still feels good when he does it. If he does it without asking, that’s even better. If he does it begrudgingly after I ask, that feels horrible (at least to me). I’m getting the same thing each time, but my satisfaction depends on whether the gesture was freely given or forcefully extracted.

Early in a relationship, there’s a lot of room to observe. You can let someone see your preferences, your needs, your way of being, and then you watch what they do with it. If you’re patient rather than demanding, you can learn what moves in them unprompted, what they offer without being told to. You may even see how they change on their own in response to you; that is, how you inspire them.

When you make a demand, you organize the dynamic around compliance. It can be soothing in the moment, creating a temporary sense of security. But like any anxious compulsion, it ultimately leads to contraction.

The field of possibility between two people narrows to the single behavior being demanded, and everything outside that behavior goes unnoticed. You stop watching for what might arise unprompted, because you’re just waiting to see whether you get the thing you asked for. The relationship gets smaller in exchange for feeling safer. Safety is important in relationship, but so maintaining the capacity for surprise.

Someone who starts making demands at the beginning of a relationship is skipping the period in which they could have found out who they were choosing. Later in the relationship, especially after some commitment has been made, you’re left to work with what you have. Maybe the decision to commit was rushed and now you’re facing the consequences, or maybe it was thoroughly considered and something has changed since. When faced with incompatibility later in a relationship, the options feel slim, and it can seem like the only way to make it work is to shake the other person into becoming who you wish they were.

Before commitment, you have the freedom to choose the person or not. The assessment is: can I love and appreciate this person as they are? Can I consciously choose to be with them, even knowing there are less than ideal things about them? Can I maintain respect for the things I find less than ideal, without secretly hoping they’ll change? To commit to someone is to answer yes to these questions.

Things can change; abuse, betrayal, and new incompatibilities can emerge, and commitment can be reversed when needed. But a commitment made on the grounds of the person changing is conditional. And when they fail to measure up to our ideal image of a partner we’ve been secretly harboring and subtly pushing them toward, we are the ones breaking our commitment (if you understand commitment how I described above).

Underneath a lot of demand is a fear less about the partner’s behavior than about managing uncertainty. Trying to secure the future by managing the person you’re with is a self-defeating pursuit. Like most opportunities for expansiveness, intimacy asks us to tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty. Really having a relationship with another free person is terrifying. By virtue of being free, they can behave unpredictably. Nothing you do changes that fact. Making demands only temporarily obscures it and eventually forecloses the possibility of two people freely relating expansively, creatively, and through inspiration rather than extraction.