Paradise Bossed

I have noticed something odd in my relationship: The less demanding I am the more my boyfriend does what I want. Are guys so defiant, like little boys, that if you tell them what to do, they won't do it? Curiously, if, after saying what I want, I add "but do what you want," he usually does the thing I was hoping for. I don't get it.

--Puzzled

"Hey, baby, let's role-play. I'll be Stalin, and you be the tens of millions of peasants he sent to labor camps!" Pick one -- having a relationship or ruling the world's tiniest totalitarian state. There are ways to get a man to do your bidding, and barking orders at him is among the least successful. (This is not the kind of doggy-style a man is hoping for.) Social psychologist Jack Brehm's research on what he deemed "psychological reactance" finds what anybody with a 2-year-old knows all too well: The more you try to pressure somebody to do something the more they will "react" -- that is, resist being controlled. You can use what you've discovered to stealth-control a guy -- trick him into bending to your will by being all "I dunno...do what you want..." However, what's better is not needing to control him. You can get to that point by being consistently giving. This tends to cue our psychological mechanism for reciprocity -- our internal accounting system that keeps track of gifts and favors we've received and bugs us when we're in the red (kind of like a bill collector who demon-calls our conscience instead of our phone). And, sure, this reciprocity thing can also be used to pull a guy's strings. But, especially over time, we seem able to sniff out people's motives. So see that you're giving out of love rather than out of a desire to, uh, nanomanage (because micromanagement is for slackers). When generosity of spirit is what's driving you, you're likely to inspire the guy to give back -- wanting to make you happy, as opposed to wanting to get your "honey-dos" out of the way so he can tie up two guards and tunnel out of the relationship with a sharpened toothbrush.