You Can’t Control Others, But You Can Choose Your Response

In intimate life there is a truth that is both liberating and difficult to tolerate: we cannot control other people. Not their behavior. Not their desire. Not their healing. Not their love. Many discover this first in sexuality where the body refuses to obey the mind. Later it appears in relationships where others refuse to obey our hopes.

As a therapist working at the intersection of existential and sexual experience I often meet clients who are exhausted by their efforts to manage or fix someone else. This is not malicious. It is human. Yet it is also a trap. The more we seek control the more we drift from the reality of the other and from the reality of ourselves.

The Stoic tradition names this tension directly. Epictetus wrote that some things are within our power while others are not. The line he draws is austere yet freeing. Our judgments, our efforts and our responses are ours. The actions of others are not. Existential thought arrives from a different direction yet arrives at a related place. Sartre argued that we are condemned to be free, meaning we are responsible for our choices regardless of circumstance. The world can disappoint us, but our response belongs to us.

Stoicism adds clarity about control. Existentialism adds depth about meaning. Together they illuminate the interpersonal field. Stoicism reminds us that the partner’s desire is not ours to manage. Existentialism asks what kind of person we become when we accept that limit and choose our way through it. Emmy van Deurzen notes that the task of therapy is not simply to adjust to life but to examine how we are living and whether that life can expand. The question shifts from “How do I change them” to “Who am I choosing to be here.”

These insights matter in sexual intimacy. Control often appears in subtle ways. Some perform sexually to prevent abandonment. Others over-accommodate to avoid conflict. Some withdraw to protect pride. Others negotiate desire as if it were a technical problem that ought to have a right answer. These strategies are understandable. They emerge from fear of rejection or exposure. Yet they distort erotic life which requires presence more than mastery.

Rollo May wrote that love opens us to sorrow as much as joy. To love is to risk disappointment. This risk reveals why control becomes appealing. If we could manage desire we could avoid the ache that accompanies uncertainty. But bodies do not conform to our plans and neither do other people. To treat relationships as machines is to miss their nature. They are processes. They unfold. They respond. They resist prediction.

Existential Sex Therapy

What remains within our reach is not the other’s behavior but our own engagement. We can choose to speak or to remain silent. We can choose to stay or to depart or to alter the shape of a relationship without blaming the other for existing as they are. We can protect our boundaries or surrender them. These are existential choices because they concern freedom, responsibility and becoming.

Existential therapy does not promise that others will change. It does not offer techniques to secure a particular outcome in love. It invites us to examine our urge for control and to notice the anxiety that fuels it. Stoicism meets us there and offers a sober reminder: we are not the architects of the world. We are the authors of our response.

Control can feel comforting but often at the cost of authenticity. When we relinquish control of others we do not surrender power. We return to what is actually ours: our values, our voice and our presence. This is not resignation. It is a form of maturity. It allows intimacy to be mutual rather than managed and it allows desire to be discovered rather than engineered.

We cannot force others to love or heal or meet us. We can choose the kind of love we offer, the boundaries we uphold, and the life we are willing to participate in. In that sober and sometimes uncomfortable space, freedom begins.