Control freaks

Warning: Highly philosophical stuffs follows

With lots of time and nothing to do, have started musing about the way of life. Well something to stop my mind from being a devil's workshop. Well till now it has just turned out to be questions questions and more questions with no answers coming out of it.

Why is that people want to control others life? I have seen this a lot and it is especially the people whom we love that we want to control. Although most of us don't even recognize that we are doing it, it comes out rather involuntarily. It is almost like "Well here is another part of my life that i need to get in order" and never "Yeah... She is an important part of my life but let her do the things her way". Agreed that she is an important part of your life, but from where does it give you the right to control it. In some situations i have seen it being done to that extent that every action might be questioned like "Why were you smiling so much? Stop smiling so much", "Why were you sitting there?? Sit here" ...

A lot many relationships have broken down due to this, but yet it couldn't be controlled as it is involuntary. I am not telling that i haven't done anything of that sort. Rather i am sure that if you draw a list of the culprits, mine will be the top most name in the list. But most of the times i have known right after i have told/done something and have either shut up or apologized, being an idiot i am it is mostly the former.

Another variation of the former is wanting others to do the things in the same way as i do. Be it a normal chore of moving a chair around, finding the sum of the cells in an excel file or be it any other simple task. We want others to do the stuffs in the same way that we do. That is the reason you see your friend moving the chair slightly off the position and then back to the same position it was in earlier after you have pushed it in. Another friend of mine amused and irritated me to the same extent when he said that i am taking the sum of the cells wrong. Well, it was the sum of some 20 rows of numbers in 3 columns and all i was doing was selecting all the 20 rows in one column and then selecting the other 2 columns, so that the entire set of numbers are selected. After 3 attempts, I came to know what was happening here and passed on the mouse to him and asked him to do his way. And what did he do select all the 3 columns in one row and then select the 20 rows. It didn't matter to him that the sum was the same. He wanted it to be done his way.

Well, one explanation i could think of for this phenomenon is that once we get comfortable with some people we start thinking that it is a part of our life. And then we would want that part of the life to be led the same way we had done all the other parts of our life. What we seem to forget is that doing so we might end up losing that part of life altogether.

Well another reason for this may be that indeed the way we are doing is not the correct one and the person might have already tried it out and thus is advising us against it. But in the world of control freaks, how do we identify these noble souls??

PS: All the gender specific instances in the above post doesn't mean that it is only one gender which does it. It just came out that way, coz it was easier to write