The standing joke in our house is that he submits gracefully to my will. Or that if I do something he wants (which I was going to do anyway), I have 'submitted gracefully to his will'. We think that whole control thing is so obnoxious that we've turned it into a big joke.
People who have heard us do this, sometimes take it wrong, until they listen to us for a few minutes and then they lighten up. Some of them have even adopted that verbage into their own relationships. I figure if we can turn the light of satire onto a really onerous idea we can turn it into a joke that people will be ashamed of even thinking of practicing/inflicting on each other. Does that make sense?