I’m the kind of person who can go with the flow, as long as I know what time the flow starts and where.
Tell me we’re meeting at seven at that restaurant and I’m easy. Change bars afterward, order another round, decide to walk somewhere else. I’m fine with all of it.
Tell me Saturday afternoon that we’re “doing something tonight,” and I will spend the next six hours wondering what, where, when, what I’m wearing, and whether I should eat first.
That can look controlling from the outside. For a lot of people, though, knowing the plan is the thing that lets them stop thinking about the plan.
Uncertainty can feel like a second job
Some people hear “we’ll figure it out later” and barely register it. The evening is still hours away. They’ll deal with it when it gets closer. There’s nothing to sort out yet, so nothing gets sorted.
Other people, like myself, immediately have five open questions running in the background. What time? How far away? Will there be food? How long will it go? Is this a six o’clock thing or an eight o’clock thing?
None of those questions are unreasonable. None of them take much energy on their own.
But when five of them are sitting there unanswered at the same time, they take up more room than they should. The brain keeps them all running at once, like tabs nobody bothered to close.
This isn’t limited to Saturday nights. It shows up with work trips that don’t have a clear itinerary, weddings where nobody has confirmed what time things start, vacations planned by someone who thinks figuring it out on arrival is half the fun.
Psychologist Bridget Flynn Walker, in a piece for Psychology Today about intolerance of uncertainty, describes it as a continuum. Everyone falls somewhere on it, and where you fall can shift with the situation.
Some people can sit comfortably in an unanswered question all afternoon. Others find that kind of openness draining, even when the stakes are low and the evening is supposed to be fun.
When I’m texting “what’s the plan?” for the third time before noon, I’m not trying to run the night. I’m trying to get the questions out of the background so I can enjoy the rest of the day.
The label sticks before anyone checks what was being asked for
She needs plans in advance. That’s been true for as long as she can remember. And for almost as long, people have been calling it controlling.
The word comes up casually, the way people say someone is “a lot” or “high-maintenance.” It doesn’t always mean anything harsh by it.
But it frames everything she does after that. Every follow-up text about timing, every question about where they’re going, every attempt to sort out logistics before they become a problem gets filtered through the idea that she’s trying to manage people.
She isn’t. She’s trying to manage the five things her brain has been doing since the plan was first mentioned and then left vague. Clothes. Timing. Parking. Whether to eat. Whether she’ll know anyone else there.
What she wanted was about four sentences’ worth of information. Dinner at seven. Downtown. Casual. Probably home around eleven.
Not a seating chart. Not approval over every decision. Not the right to veto a restaurant or a guest list. She didn’t care about any of that.
She’s been ready to be easy about tonight since this morning. She was waiting for those four sentences. The group chat gave her zero.
Psychologist Graham Davey at the University of Sussex, in a piece for Psychology Today about uncertainty and worry, writes that unresolved uncertainty can trigger a cycle of hypothetical thinking. One question generates another, which leads to another, which leads to another.
Her mind is working through a problem it doesn’t have the inputs to solve. Each unanswered question keeps the loop running, and the loop keeps her checking the group chat, rethinking her outfit, holding off on errands she could have finished hours ago.
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The starting point is what makes the rest of the night possible
Once she has the plan, she’s done with it. She doesn’t bring a printed itinerary. She doesn’t hold the group to a schedule. She doesn’t care if the night goes somewhere nobody expected.
Someone suggests a different restaurant at the last minute. Fine. The group decides to skip dinner and go straight to a bar. Fine. The night goes an hour longer than anyone expected. Also fine.
None of that bothers her. She’s not asking for every minute to be mapped. She needed a starting point sturdy enough to stop preparing and start being present. Once it’s there, the rest can move.
That’s the part that gets missed when someone like this is called rigid. The word implies they can’t bend. Most of the time, they bend more easily than anyone once they know what they’re bending from.
Researcher Michael Ungar at Dalhousie University, in a piece for Psychology Today about how predictability helps manage uncertainty, describes how routine works by removing what he calls the noisy uncertainty of making endless small decisions.
When that noise settles, the energy that was going toward unresolved logistics can go toward what’s happening right now.
That’s the trade. For these people, structure is what makes spontaneity possible. Without it, they spend the whole pregame doing mental logistics instead of looking forward to the night. With it, they become the person who’s up for anything.
There is a line. If a changed reservation ruins the whole night, or every detail has to be decided in advance, or the people around them start feeling managed instead of included, that’s crossed into control.
Needing to eliminate all uncertainty can make it harder to tolerate over time. The healthier version is simpler: “give me the outline so I can stop writing one myself.”
The plan was never the point
I know how this works because I’ve lived it from the inside. That Saturday I mentioned at the top, the one where somebody said we were “doing something tonight” and left it at that?
I didn’t spend those six hours worried about the evening. I spent them running through it in advance so I could stop thinking about it.
By the time we left, I’d already mentally gotten dressed twice and eaten a snack I didn’t need because I wasn’t sure dinner was part of the deal.
Give me the time, the place, and the general idea, and none of that happens. I know when to be ready. I know what I’m walking into. I can plan my afternoon, stop refreshing the group chat, stop wondering whether I should eat.
And when plans shift once we’re out? It doesn’t bother me at all. I already had my footing. Changing direction from solid ground is easy. Changing direction while still looking for the ground is the hard part.
That’s why “go with the flow” is such odd advice for people like this. We can go with the flow. We’d prefer to know what time it starts.
