04 Aug 01

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Control Freaks

I've been thinking about my ex husband a lot lately. Have you ever known a control freak? I don't mean someone who wants to be in control of their own home, or a boss who wants to control what generally goes on in the workplace. I mean people who want to control things they neither have responsibility over or a right to control. In other words, things that are none of their damn business.

This was the killing factor in my marriage. That stuff I said up there about controlling your own home - well if you are a co-owner or co-habitor of the home, then you get to co-control it, not assert sole dominion outright.

Hey, if a one-party dictatorship works in your home, please forgive and disregard the rest of this entry. It doesn't work in my home, and has never been successful where tried in any home I have observed.

So you have to get consensus.

And all of this is constrained by the limitations of reasonability as well. Controlling your home doesn't mean, for instance, that you can break the lock on your teenager's diary and read it, simply because it is stored in your home, written into in your home, and/or owned by someone who lives in your home. There's a reasonable amount of privacy a person should be entitled to, and you as a controller of the home, have to negotiate with whomever else lives there what that level is and respect it.

I've seen people who failed to follow this principle pay for it in blood later.

My ex was completely uninterested in either consensus or reasonability. The thing that tore it for me was the day he told me that I may not hang my maps on the walls of my home office.

See, the whole point of there being a home office was for me to use it to do web work and make money. It was where I spent hours and hours per day. Now, I had ceded decorative responsibility for most of the house to my then spouse, on the grounds that he'd had enough Martha Stewart and Better Homes and Gardens infusions than I would ever see, much less be interested in. He's the domestic one.

But this office, this was my sanctum, my workplace, my universe. It was on an upper floor and rarely took visitors. Of all the spaces in the entire place, this one alone I desired to make pleasing to my eye, not his.

That sucker forbade me to hang my maps. My precious and sentimentally valuable maps. Can you believe that stuff? He said he would not permit me to put them on the walls!

I still feel like doing violence when I think about that. It wasn't the only example of what I am talking about. This kind of thing happened far too often. No, this example I gave is simply the one I remember plainest, because that was the time I decided I'd had just about enough.

Now, this was somebody I loved. Later on in years when I encountered other, lesser people who tried to control something in my world that was plainly out of their domain, I spared nothing. If I wouldn't tolerate it from a spouse, you can be damned well sure I wouldn't tolerate it from a boss, friend, coworker, acquaintance, or anyone else. And god knows it's been tried.

So lately I have been thinking that this might be one of the reasons I haven't just leapt right out into the corporate world again. That environment is liberally strewn with control freaks, and one can get weary of exercising perception realignment, if one has to do it too often. That and all the other bullshit that corporate wage slaves have to endure just about makes being broke look appetizing. 

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