Are You a Puppet in Your Dating Relationship?

If someone is a manipulator, it implies there might be a few things going on behind the scenes in their life that have lead them to unofficially wear the title. Of course, no one would probably ever call themselves a manipulator, because the moniker comes with negative connotations. Regardless, there are certain people who just are manipulators.

Quite often when I hear the word “manipulator,” I think of a person who schemes in the shadows, wearing an evil smile as they steeple their fingers and plot the demise of other people’s well-being. This is certainly not always true, but as cartoonish as this mental image might seem to you, it still rests on the idea that being a manipulator is not a good thing. The sad truth is that each and every one of us wrestles with manipulation in our lives from time to time.

I certainly have. I’ve often caught myself saying or doing little things in order to purposefully ignite a reaction in someone else. Back in college, there was a season when my roommate and I used to intentionally call ourselves “ugly” in front of girls just to “be funny.” Truthfully, I just wanted the girls to disagree with me so I could feel better about myself and garner some sort of reaction out of them. When I said I was ugly, my true motivations were surprising and subtle, because I didn’t really dig deeper into the reasons for my manipulation until a friend of mine called me on it. She literally smacked me on the arm one evening and told me to stop saying what I was saying because she knew what I was attempting to do. It was a wake-up call for me, and I consequently became more cautious about the kind of joking I did. Manipulation can be a dark art that is embedded into our regular behavior, and it’s important that we cut it out of our lifestyle, because it is poisonous for both us and the relationships we care about.

Plain and simple, when we want to manipulate, we want to control things. Why? Well, there could be many driving factors, but my bet is that when things boil down to the most basic reason, we find that people who struggle with consistent manipulation of others have a lot of trouble with trust.

Naturally, when you trust someone, it means that you place your faith in them. And although we talk a lot about being faithful in Christian circles, it’s actually something we don’t do very much. We have trouble trusting God and others, so the void often gets filled with our feeble attempts at trying to control the Creator of the universe, while at the same time trying to manipulate the people around us. We do this because we think that if we are in the driver’s seat of our lives, we can steer it in any direction we wish. This is a comforting thing. It protects us from injury.

If someone is in the habit of regularly trying to control the people in their life, dangerous tactics of manipulation frequently get pulled into their dating relationships as well, and when this happens, things can get completely ugly fairly fast. Nobody wants to be a puppet, especially if they think they are being controlled by the person they’re romantically involved with, but the dark art of manipulation is a frequent problem between couples. Remember, manipulation is the fruit of a lack of trust, and although a boyfriend or girlfriend may not have given their dating partner any reason to distrust them, the seeds of uncertainty can come from a deep place in their history, causing problems in the present. Quite often, manipulation of a dating partner is simply the default because they’ve been burned in the past by a previous romantic partner. Control might be the only way they feel they can protect themselves from getting hurt again.

I’m not a psychologist, but I have worked with a number of people over the years who have confided in me about their relationship woes. And sadly, there are many young people who walk around injured from a crappy relationship history, and the thought of freely trusting someone again within the world of romance is overwhelming. So much so, that they don’t even know how to engage with someone in a healthy way, free of manipulation.

If I have just described you or someone you know, don’t be discouraged—there is hope! If we are ever going to be able to trust other people fully, we must first start with trusting the One who created us. It begins here. If your relationship with God isn’t right, no other friendship or romantic relationship will be fully right either. When we are able to engage freely with God and trust Him because we believe He is good and He loves us, our other earthly relationships will flow directly from the most important one. If our perspective on God is properly in tune with the truth that our Father wants what is best for us (in spite of our circumstances), we will be able to experience deep intimacy with Him, and this gives us the freedom to release our control of those around us.

We will believe Him when He says,

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

and

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13)

and

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

(Above is an excerpt from my book on dating and relationships, entitled I Am A Tool. If you’d like to read more, you can find it HERE.)