Member-only story
When Your Partner Weaponizes Fragility To Control You
You’ve heard of weaponized incompetence, right? It’s where a person feigns a lack of ability to complete a task in order to avoid responsibility for it. It explains why so many men are so bad at ironing and why it’s always the junior female staff members who organise the birthday lunches.
Well what about where a person is consistently unable to do the work of being in a relationship because they claim they are not emotionally up to it?
I was in a relationship with such a person. Being in the grip of this phenomenon, I struggled to pin it down. However, with the clarity that comes with a couple of years hindsight, I now have a term for it: weaponized fragility.
This person had a way of always being the victim and making me the bad person. Not only did they weaponize fragility to avoid the emotional responsibility of being in a relationship — they used it to control and manipulate me. They did such a good job on me that it didn’t hit me until well after the relationship was over that I was the wronged party.
Here’s how weaponized fragility can play out in a relationship.
