There's a storm going on right now around a Swedish TV relationship, where a man doesn't want the woman he married on the show to spend time with other men, even as friends. The comment sections are overflowing. Some defend him, call it care, a wish for security in a new relationship. Others see something else entirely, an early sign of control, dressed up as love. I won't try to guess what's actually going on inside that particular man, that would be unfair to someone I've only seen through edited television and quotes in online threads. But the debate itself, and how fiercely it's playing out, says something important about a pattern I recognize from my own work with the psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Jung believed that every human being, regardless of gender, carries two inner forces. Animus is the structuring, boundary setting, decisive side. Anima is the receptive, feeling, trusting side. A whole psyche needs both working together. Problems arise when one force takes over at the expense of the other, especially when animus, the part that sets limits and takes control, becomes so dominant that it's driven more by fear than by real judgment.
In the book I'm currently writing, I describe how relationships can become deeply unbalanced when that particular force takes over in a way that no longer serves the relationship, only itself. Healthy animus sets a reasonable boundary, says no when something is genuinely wrong, protects what needs protecting. Unbalanced animus does something else. It tries to own, restrict, control the other person's freedom of movement in the world, often in the name of love or care, but with fear as its real driving force underneath.
Not wanting your partner to spend time with other men, or other women if the roles were reversed, is rarely, at its core, about what the partner is actually doing. It's usually about what the person making the demand is carrying inside themselves. Insecurity. A fear of not being enough. A deep, often unconscious belief that love has to be guarded or it will disappear. Jung might have said this is someone who has never truly integrated their own anima, their own capacity for trust, and who therefore projects all their insecurity outward, onto the partner's social life, instead of facing it within themselves.
The same holds just as true in the other direction. A woman with an overactive, unprocessed animus can show exactly the same pattern, checking a partner's phone, questioning every female friend, demanding a constant account of where he is and who he's with. Jealousy isn't tied to a gender, it's tied to imbalance, to an animus that has stopped serving the relationship and started running it on fear instead. The difference between the sexes rarely lies in the pattern itself, but in how society reads it, a jealous man is often called protective, a jealous woman is often called hysterical, but the inner mechanism is the same in both.
What makes this pattern so treacherous is how often it dresses itself in the language of love. I just want to protect you. I just want us to be strong together. I'm just afraid of losing you. The words sound tender. But the consequence, a partner who gradually loses their own social life, their own relationships, their own freedom of movement, is rarely tender in practice. It's isolating. And isolation, at its root, is rarely a sign of strong love. More often it's a sign of weak trust, both in oneself and in the person one claims to love.
Healthy balance looks entirely different. It makes room for both forces to work together instead of one silencing the other. A secure animus sets boundaries that protect the relationship, not boundaries that shrink the partner's world, it's about speaking up when something is genuinely harmful, not about controlling who the other person gets coffee with. An integrated anima offers trust that isn't born of naivety, a quiet knowing that closeness doesn't require surveillance to hold. Two people who both rest in that balance can have a full life outside the relationship, their own friends, their own space, without it being read as a threat, because their security in each other comes from within, not from controlling what the other does when no one's watching.
I don't think this pattern is only about individual "bad" men or women. I think it's about how many of us were never taught the difference between holding someone and holding onto someone. The first gesture gives room. The second one takes it.
And until we, as a culture, get better at seeing that difference, regardless of which gender is exercising it, we'll likely keep dressing control in the language of love, both on television and in real living rooms far beyond the camera.
You can read more about this in my upcoming book, There's Nothing Wrong With You, You're Just Out of Balance, which explores this exact kind of imbalance, in relationships, in leadership, in entire societies, through Carl Jung's ideas about anima and animus and what happens when they're allowed to work together or are silenced instead.