Controls a partner's money, friends or movements
They check the partner's phone, decide who they can see, and need to know where they are at all times.
Rule out first
Arrangements both people chose and can renegotiate. A partner with a real problem such as addiction or debt. Cultural norms the couple both endorse.
What could explain it
Coercive control: A pattern that isolates, degrades and restricts, with consequences for refusing. The partner has shrunk: fewer friends, less money, more fear.
Jealousy: Fixed on rivals: the control focuses on particular people, not on all of the partner's freedoms.
Abandonment/instability schema: The control is anxious and pleading rather than punishing; they're terrified of being left, not of being disobeyed.
Paranoid personality: They suspect disloyalty everywhere, at work and among friends too, not only in the relationship.
Omnipotent control: They treat the partner as an extension of themselves and seem genuinely surprised that the partner has separate wishes.
Objectification: seven ways of treating a person as a thing (Nussbaum): Ownership and violability lead: 'you're mine', the phone checked as of right, plans made for the partner. The partner's preferences never change the outcome.
A next move
Watch what happens when the partner sets a boundary. Anxiety and pleading points to fear; punishment points to control. If it's punishment, treat it as a safety issue, not a puzzle to solve.
If it’s you
When I need to know where they are, what am I trying not to feel?