Possessiveness

When you really like a girl, there’s a good chance you’ll f*ck it up by holding on too tight.

Not by cheating. Not by being boring. By being possessive.

It comes across as needy, insecure or controlling, and none of those are attractive. I’ve been all three, so this isn’t me looking down on you.

You don’t own a person, no matter how much you love them.

Possessiveness is the urge to keep someone all to yourself, and it runs on fear, not love. It feels like love from the inside. From her side it looks like a cage, and every check, every question and every rule is another bar.

Here are the signs I’d look for, because I’ve shown most of them.

Missing her is fine. Obsessing over where she is and who she’s with is not.

If you’re on edge every time she’s not next to you, that isn’t love. It’s anxiety wearing love’s coat.

The honest reason it happens is that she’s the only thing you’ve got going on. When your whole week is her, an evening without her feels like a threat.

So build a week that isn’t her. Mates, training, work you care about, a project. When you’ve got your own sh*t going on, you won’t need to cling so damn tight. I wrote about learning that the hard way in Neediness.

Going through her texts, her DMs or her Instagram says one thing: I don’t trust you. Nobody wants to live under surveillance, and nobody stays with it for long.

I’ve been on the receiving end of it. Woken up at 2am to “Who’s Stacey?” over an Instagram search I couldn’t remember making. I covered the whole mess in Privacy Problem, and the short version is that the search found nothing and the relationship still took the hit.

If something’s bothering you, say it to her face. Talking beats playing detective every time, and it has the advantage of not being creepy.

Telling her who she can and can’t see is controlling, plain and simple. She’s not your property.

She had a life before you and she’ll have one with or without you. The girls she goes out with, the male mate from uni, her family. They were there first.

Push her to see them. It sounds backwards, but a girl who comes home from a night out happy is a girl who wants to come home.

Fishing for compliments. Needing her to tell you the relationship is fine. Reading her short reply as the beginning of the end.

That’s insecurity, and it does something cruel. The more you worry she’ll go, the clingier you get, and the clingier you get, the more she wants to go. It writes its own ending.

The fix isn’t her reassuring you more. It’s you needing it less. Accept that every relationship can end and you can’t control that bit. You can control whether you’re someone worth staying with.

You should complement each other, not complete each other.

Jealous over a laugh. Cold shoulder over a like. Checking her stories to see who’s in them. Turning up at the bar she said she’d be at, by accident.

Grow up. Her laughing at someone else doesn’t take anything from you. Confidence is knowing what you bring to the table without needing to flip it over.

And showing up unannounced isn’t romantic. It’s stalking with a bunch of flowers. Trust that she’ll message because she wants to, not because you forced it.

None of this is random, and it isn’t just you.

John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, spent the 1950s and 60s arguing that how we were looked after as kids sets the template for how we attach as adults. Mary Ainsworth tested it in Baltimore in the 1970s with the Strange Situation: a toddler, a stranger, mum leaves the room, mum comes back. Some kids were fine. Some ignored her. Some clung and screamed and couldn’t settle.

In 1987 Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver put the same three types to adults, through a questionnaire in the Rocky Mountain News. Roughly half were secure. A quarter kept people at arm’s length. The last fifth were anxious: they fell fast, worried their partner didn’t love them back and wanted to merge with them completely.

That last fifth is the possessive lot. If you recognised yourself in most of the sections above, that’s probably you, and it was me.

Knowing it isn’t an excuse. It’s a starting point. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s book Attached is where I first saw my own behaviour written down, and it was uncomfortable reading.

If you really care about her, let her breathe.

If she’s going to leave, the bars won’t stop her. They’ll just make sure she wants to.