7 Manipulative Behaviors You Partner Uses To Get Their Own Way

Are you being manipulated?

A woman in a plaid shirt holds puppet strings attached to a smaller man holding white flowers, making him appear as a puppet. The man is smiling and looking up at the woman. Both are set against a plain, light background.

Healthy relationships require sacrifice and compromise on occasion.

From both parties.

But sometimes it can feel like your partner is always getting their way, and you’re getting very little in return.

It can be hard to figure out where the line is between making healthy sacrifices and being taken advantage of in a relationship.

Here are 7 signs of manipulation to help you figure it out.

1. They guilt trip you.

A man and woman sit on a bed in a serious conversation. The man, wearing a blue sweater and jeans, gestures with his hands while the woman, in a light grey sweater and jeans, has her arms folded, looking away with a concerned expression.

Any decisions you make in the relationship should be one of your own choosing. They should be based on the benefits it will bring to you, your partner, or your relationship.

But if your partner tries to guilt trip you into doing something that you don’t really want to do, that’s not cool.

They may make you feel bad if you attempt to deny them something they want. They may complain that you are holding them back or making them unhappy.

They may even bring up past things they did for you in an attempt to sway you.

2. They try to make you go against your values.

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There are some things we do or don’t do because they resonate so strongly with our inner being. These are our values and morals and beliefs that, whilst perhaps not set in stone, are dearly important to us.

If your partner is trying to make you do something that goes against these values, it’s a sign of manipulation.

If they have any respect for you, they’d understand that it is unacceptable to ask you to go against the beliefs that are important to you.

As with guilt trips, you shouldn’t feel pressured into doing something just because your partner wants you to.

If they persist regardless of how you feel, you may have to seriously question the relationship and your partner’s commitment to it and you.

3. They see your compromises and acts of kindness as expectations.

A man sits at a kitchen table with an empty plate, looking frustrated and holding a fork and knife. In the background, a woman is cooking on a stove and turning to look at him. The kitchen is neatly organized with shelves and various kitchen items.

Let’s say that you make dinner every single night for a month, and then don’t cook on the last night. A partner who is trying to manipulate you will conveniently forget those 29 or 30 amazing meals that you made. Instead, they’ll focus on the one time you “let them down.”

They’ll acclimatize to that kind of behavior from you, and as a result, will get uncomfortable and upset when it doesn’t happen.

Instead of seeing it as an act of love and kindness they’ll just see it as “how things are.” Why would they reciprocate when that’s the thing you do?

This is a routine that they’re comfortable with: it is now an expectation, not something to be appreciated.

4. They deny you time and space to yourself.

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Everyone needs to have time to themselves. When you have some precious time alone, and your partner makes unreasonable demands on you during that time (especially when they know you want to just decompress and do your own thing), that’s many shades of unhealthy.

This is especially bad if they make these demands of you, but would get livid if you did the same thing to them.

Some partners who are very insecure don’t like their partners having alone time because of their own trust issues. They’ll assume that you’re talking to someone else, or they’ll take your desire for solitude personally: how dare you want to be alone rather than spending quality time with them?!

5. They use you as an emotional dumping ground.

A man in a white t-shirt and blue jeans is sitting on a beige couch, engaging in a conversation with a woman. He appears to be attentive, with his right arm resting on the back of the couch and his left hand on his knee. The woman is partially visible, gesturing with her hands.

It can be very frustrating when a partner continually uses you as a sounding board to work through their own difficult emotions. Things get even more frustrating and uncomfortable when they vomit their emotional baggage into your lap and then walk off.

They’ll feel great because they just alleviated a ton of their personal problems. Meanwhile, you’re utterly weighed down by all their drama, doing their emotional labor for them. You literally sacrifice your emotional well-being for the sake of theirs.

This is never okay, especially if and when you don’t live together. Many people find that they’ll give up some of their precious downtime to listen to all their partner’s woes, only to be hung up on as soon as their lover has finished venting.

In essence, the one with all the frustrations is using their partner as a therapist, then walking away. Like dumping a huge bag of trash in the bin and then brushing their hands off. “Glad that’s gone: someone else can deal with it now.”

If this is something your partner does to you on a regular basis, you need to call them out on it.

6. They get angry when you say no.

A man and woman are sitting on a couch in a heated discussion. The man, wearing glasses and a checkered shirt, gestures passionately with his hands and has an angry expression. The woman, in a green sweater and jeans, gestures back, looking distressed.

As a result of their anger, you start to set aside your own needs and desires to avoid conflict.

This motivation for harmony in the face of undesirable sacrifices is far from healthy. If you don’t feel able to engage in any sort of conflict with your partner and so bend to their will every time, you will give up so much of what you like and enjoy.

This ends up in a horribly unbalanced dynamic. One person gives and gives, the other takes and takes. After a while, if the giving isn’t reciprocated, that well is going to run dry.

In fact, it won’t just run dry: it’ll be full of dust, and the remnants of the relationship will roll along by like tumbleweeds.

It’s understandable that people sometimes “pick their battles” and choose wisely whether to voice their needs and frustrations. For instance, whether or not to complain when their partner doesn’t do the thing they asked them to.

But when you never pick any battles at all, you are communicating to your partner that they can have what they want every time and do whatever they wish without any pushback.

7. They expect you to do things that make you unhappy.

A woman with light brown hair, wearing a denim jacket over a striped shirt, stands with her arms crossed and a serious expression in a kitchen. In the background, a man in a blue shirt leans against the kitchen counter, partially blurred.

We may bend to our partner’s desire to watch a movie that we have no interest in, rather than insisting on the one we wanted, simply because it’ll make them happy. Same goes for allowing the other to choose the restaurant for a night out together.

When a relationship is balanced and healthy, both partners will do these kinds of things for one another. Often with some playful groaning and eye-rolling, but they’ll do it nonetheless.

They might even enjoy seeing how happy the other person is when they get to do what they love, even though it’s not enjoyable for them.

The key here is that the thing your partner is asking you to do is not something that affects your well-being in any major way.

If your partner is repeatedly expecting you to put their happiness before yours AND you will actually suffer quite a lot because of their request, that’s a different matter entirely.

Finally…

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