Sometimes it is just too scary to let someone else make the decisions. Other times the fear of losing someone is so powerful we won’t even let ourselves get close to them. These sound rather extreme but are more common in marriages than we might think. Let’s take a look at what triggers these fears.

Again, we want to acknowledge the research and wisdom of Dr. Weeks and Dr. Treat in examining these fears of intimacy. To recap from Part 1 and Part 2, fear is present in all of our lives to varying degrees and comes with many, many faces. How should we deal with fear? Acknowledge it, name it, and talk to your spouse about it. Always move towards it, not away from it, and you will disempower fear!

Fear #5: Fear of Losing Control or Being Controlled

Weeks and Treat state, that “Healthy relationships are based on mutual control. Partners share the power and control in the relationship.” That is our baseline and our assumption here, that there is some give and take to the control in the marriage. We see the balance in the Bible verse that precedes the classic text about marriage in Ephesians 5: “Submit yourselves to one another”.

Submission is not something to brow-beat your spouse with – it is something to be mutually given in marriage!

Alright, back to the Fear of Control after a little side rant there… :)

A spouse with this fear may actively resist or else passively give in to their spouse. This fear is actually very complex as a person may fear that getting too intimate will result in a loss of control of one’s life. There are two levels of meaning here:

Giving in or fighting control gives us a diversion from having to have deeper discussions that involve mutuality: which really is an intimate activity. This is why it is a fear of intimacy. By being controlled or by being controlling I can keep you out of my inner workings. Both are avoidance strategies.

The deeper meaning is that losing control means feeling engulfed by the spouse. I lose myself, and my self-identity, if I am not in control. Often these folks will search (and this is paradoxical) for someone to complete themselves (a strong partner) but then need to recoil from that to preserve the little sense of self they do have. They don’t know who they are or what they want.

If you are in the first group, you will not let your guard down to let others know you. Often there is an assumption that the knowledge that comes from being vulnerable will be used against you. At the same time, you may not know how to assert yourself properly.

This often comes from parents who were over-controlling and did not promote competency and maturity. You may have been a child set up to take tasks beyond your capability and then had your parents stand back and watch you flop.

These marriages have a hard time with intimacy because it is more parent-child than equal to equal. It is regressive. It creates something that parallels what happened in your family of origin where your parents were over-controlling.

Again, the response is to own your stuff and then work through the task of piecing your identity together. It will be a challenging but wonderful journey. You will benefit from having a supportive spouse who respects boundaries and will lift you to that equal-to-equal place rather than buying into the parent-child pattern.

Fear #6: Fear of Abandonment/Rejection

In normal relationships, we all take this risk: the more we emotionally invest in our relationship, the more it hurts when the whole thing goes down in flames. Bring the fear of abandonment or rejection into this and it really complicates things.

If you have been hurt, you are wary to get too close too soon or to get close at all. If you have experienced traumatic abandonment (like death, divorce or desertion of a parent) and never had the opportunity to work through that, then it is even more severe. Or sometimes in adulthood, we can go through relational experiences that really build this f...