When Fear Drives Control
What You Can and Cannot Control in Your Marriage
When your marriage is in crisis, you feel like you’re drowning. Everything that once felt solid and predictable is suddenly unstable. The person you counted on is pulling away. The future you imagined is at risk. And in that terrifying space, something instinctive happens: you reach for control.
Maybe you monitor their phone. Maybe you demand reassurance. Maybe you try to manage every interaction, choreograph every conversation, engineer every outcome. Maybe you grasp at relationship advice like love languages and weaponize them - doing all the “right things” not because you genuinely want to connect, but because you’re desperately trying to get your spouse to respond the way you need them to (I’ll go into this in a future article).
If you recognize yourself in this, I want you to hear something important: You are not a bad person. You are a scared person.
The Truth About Control
Here’s what most people don’t understand about controlling behavior: It’s not usually about wanting power over someone else. It’s about feeling powerless yourself.
When your marriage is falling apart, you’re experiencing multiple devastating losses all at once:
Loss of predictability (I don’t know what will happen),
Loss of safety (my foundation is crumbling),
Loss of connection (the person I love is pulling away),
Loss of identity (who am I if this marriage ends?),
Loss of future (everything I imagined is at risk).
That’s terrifying. And when humans feel terrified, we instinctively try to grab control of SOMETHING - anything - to stop the free-fall.
The problem is, the things you’re trying to control , like your spouse’s feelings, their choices, their response to you, whether they stay or go… those things were never actually in your control. You’re trying to grip water. The tighter you squeeze, the more it slips through your fingers.
And worse: The more you try to control your spouse, the more you push them away. They feel the pressure. They sense the manipulation. They experience your fear as demand, your desperation as burden. And they pull back further.
Your fear-driven control actually creates more of what you’re afraid of.
The Illusion of Control
The cruel irony is that trying to control the uncontrollable doesn’t just fail.
It backfires.
It damages the very connection you’re trying to save.
When you operate from fear and try to manage your spouse’s responses:
Every gesture feels strategic rather than sincere,
Every “I love you” sounds like a negotiation,
Every act of kindness comes with invisible strings attached,
Every conversation feels like a manipulation.
Your spouse can feel this, even if they can’t articulate it. And it confirms their worst fears: “You don’t really love me. You’re just trying to get something from me.”
The relationship becomes transactional rather than transformational. You’re both playing roles, performing scripts, trying to manage each other instead of actually connecting.
What You Actually CAN Control
So if you can’t control your spouse, what CAN you control?
The answer is simple, but not easy: You can control yourself.
Specifically, you can control three things - what I call your Aspirations, Attitude, and Actions:
YOUR ASPIRATIONS
Who do you want to become through this crisis? What kind of person do you want to be, regardless of how your spouse responds?
This isn’t about achieving a specific outcome in your marriage. It’s about who you’re becoming as a human being. Do you want to be someone who loves well, even when it’s hard? Someone who acts from their values rather than their fears? Someone who maintains their integrity regardless of whether it “works”?
You get to choose that. Your spouse doesn’t control it. Circumstances don’t control it. That’s entirely in your hands.
YOUR ATTITUDE
How do you choose to approach this situation internally?
You can’t control your initial emotional reactions - fear, anger, hurt, desperation are all natural. But you CAN control what you do with those feelings. Do you let them drive your behavior? Do you feed them with worst-case thinking and catastrophizing? Or do you acknowledge them, feel them, and then choose to act from a different place?
You can choose curiosity over defensiveness. Humility over self-righteousness. Patience over demand. Generosity over scorekeeping.
Your attitude is yours to shape. You can decide to figure it out… or walk away. That is only for you to decide.
YOUR ACTIONS
What you actually DO — the choices you make, the words you speak, the behaviors you engage in — that’s entirely within your control. The same for what you DON’T DO — what you don’t do or say.
You can’t control whether your spouse responds positively to your actions. But you can control whether your actions are authentic expressions of who you want to be.
You can choose to:
Speak kindly, even when you’re hurt,
Act with integrity, even when you’re angry,
Love generously, even when you’re not receiving it back,
Show up fully, even when they’re distant,
Be honest, even when it’s uncomfortable.
These are YOUR choices. Nobody else controls them.
The Shift That Changes Everything
When you stop trying to control what you can’t control and instead focus on what you CAN control, something profound happens:
You get your power back.
Not power over your spouse. Not power over the outcome. But power over yourself. Agency in your own life. The ability to act from your values rather than being driven by your fears.
Instead of asking, “How do I get my spouse to love me again?” (which keeps you stuck in trying to control the uncontrollable), you start asking, “Who do I want to be in this marriage, regardless of what happens?”
That question gives you:
A focus for your energy (your own growth, not managing them),
A sense of purpose (becoming better, not just feeling better),
Actual agency (you CAN control who you’re becoming),
Dignity (you’re not begging, performing, or manipulating),
And here’s the paradox: When you stop trying to control the outcome and instead become genuinely focused on your own transformation, when you stop performing and start being real, that’s when reconnection becomes possible.
Not guaranteed.
But possible.
Because your spouse might finally feel safe enough to soften. They might finally sense something authentic instead of strategic. They might finally have space to change because you’ve stopped demanding it.
The Hard Truth
I need to be honest with you: This shift requires you to face your deepest fear.
You have to be willing to do this work — to become genuinely loving, to focus on your own growth, to let go of control — with NO guarantee that your marriage will survive.
You have to be willing to become the person who loves well even if your spouse never changes. Even if they leave. Even if this marriage doesn’t work out the way you desperately want it to.
That’s terrifying. Everything in you wants to grab tighter, to find some lever you can pull that will make them stay, make them love you, make everything okay again.
But that path… the path of fear and control… doesn’t lead where you want to go. It only creates more distance, more pain, more of what you’re afraid of.
The only way through is to face the fear and choose love anyway. Real love.
Without guarantees.
Starting Today
If you recognize yourself in this article, if you see how fear has been driving you toward control, here’s what I want you to do:
First, acknowledge the fear. Name it. “I’m terrified my marriage is ending. I’m scared of losing everything. I feel completely powerless.” That’s true. That’s real. Don’t shame yourself for it.
Second, notice when you’re trying to control what you can’t control. When you’re monitoring, managing, manipulating, demanding, performing. Just notice it. Become aware of the pattern.
Third, redirect your energy to what you CAN control. Ask yourself:
Who do I want to be right now?
What attitude am I choosing to bring to this moment?
What action can I take that aligns with my values, regardless of how they respond?
This won’t fix everything immediately. This won’t guarantee your marriage survives. But it will give you back yourself. It will give you agency. It will give you dignity.
And it will create the only conditions under which real reconnection is actually possible.
The work isn’t to control your spouse. The work is to become someone who loves well, no matter what.
That’s what you can control. And that’s enough.
Dr. Lee H. Baucom is a marriage coach with over 30 years of experience helping couples save and restore their relationships. He is the creator of the Save The Marriage System and author of How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps.