Out of the dating scene a while, he was surprised to find this sultry brunette catching his eye at the grocery store. She accepted his invitation for lunch, laughed at his jokes and seemed to reciprocate the mutual attraction.

He fell hard and fast but a few weeks into the relationship, Martin began to notice a gradual change in Marie’s behavior. She began making little suggestions — things they should do, restaurants they should visit, meals they should try, that special shirt or belt that he should wear on their dates. And Martin, wanting to please, willingly accommodated her numerous requests.

Changes in behavior 

"She’d be sweet as pie about it," Martin recalls. "Even if I disagreed with her, it’d be difficult to broach the topic because she’d do it with a smile."

But even Martin was flabbergasted at Marie’s reaction when he told her, after a month of exclusively spending consecutive weekends together, he was going to take the coming Friday night and kick back a few beers with the boys.

Marie sulked and threw a tantrum, and Martin saw the first signs of what would become a living hell: Life with the Controller.

"She expressed shock and disappointment when I had anything on my social calendar that didn’t include her," he remembers. "And she’d never let me forget it."

Kindness quickly turned to criticism and within a few weeks, "The Lecture" replaced love. Martin felt his self-worth quickly turn to mush.

"I felt horrible, because not only was I apparently not meeting her needs, but since no one had treated me like that before, I blamed myself," he concedes. "I believed that I deserved it, otherwise she wouldn’t have been saying those things. The lectures were frequent and endless."

Martin says the key phrase Marie would often repeat was ‘You need to change.’

"It was never about bad habits," he realizes. "It was an assault on my character. Many things were insidious, particularly her ability to extract me from my friends and family over a relatively short period of time without me realizing what was happening."

Seeing it can be tricky 

…

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