He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (12 page)

Carl echoes something that we have heard from many people. When the decisions are purely business related, he has no difficulty. It’s only when it becomes personal that it creates a problem. He says:

“When it comes to business, I’m very decisive. Decisions that have personal consequences I have a hard time making. That ranges from career decisions to what movie I want to see. Decisions that are purely intellectual I can make at the drop of a hat.”

FAULTFINDING—WHAT ACTIVE AVOIDERS TELL THEMSELVES

Even though they want to leave their options open, active avoiders have a clear-cut pattern of forming attachments. In order to maintain their freedom they have to be particularly skillful at dissolving these tender ties. How do they justify rejecting partners at whom they may have shamelessly thrown themselves? Once
they are involved with someone, how are they able to extricate themselves?

Unable genuinely to confront their phobic reactions to commitment, such people usually throw at least part of the blame for failed relationships on their partner. When you can’t explain to yourself why you can’t make a long-term commitment, what you do is look for all the ways in which your partner is less than perfect. And everybody is less than perfect. It’s easy to find faults. Every person has them; every relationship has them. But to the eye of someone who is experiencing commitment panic, faults in others, whether real or imagined, are magnified and used to justify conflicted behavior.

If an active avoider is frightened enough, nothing is sacred. Such a man or woman can find fault with your values, your religion, your intellect, your height, the way you are in the world, your hairline, your friends, your children, your pets, your job, your style, your habits, your house, your past, your future, your psyche, your mother, your clothes, your debts, your expenses, your small bank account, your large bank account, your profession, or your earning capacity.

It’s interesting to note that the “fault” often concerns an intrinsic quality, one the active avoider must have known when the relationship began. We have interviewed a great many people, for example, who keep backing away from commitment because their partners are the “wrong” religion, something they were aware of all along.

This faultfinding has a definite goal: to create distance within a relationship. Those who are actively avoiding commitment have to find something “wrong” with their partners. It provides an easy excuse to end the relationship, should they need it. When someone is looking for an out, any excuse will do.

THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

“My marriage was stifling. I would look out the window at the lawn and I would imagine bars between me and the rest of the world. I felt completely crushed.”

—SHARON, thirty-two

You can frequently spot the men and women with active commitment issues simply by paying attention to the words they use. Often they articulate their fear. They may talk about their need for “freedom,” “space,” “air,” or “room to breathe.” When they describe past relationships, they may say that they felt “trapped,” “stuck,” “boxed in,” “caught,” “tied down,” “stifled,” “smothered,” “choked,” “crowded,” or “suffocated.”

They may complain about relationships in which they couldn’t “breathe.” After a relationship ends, they may say, “It’s as if someone removed this tremendous weight from my body.”

In an earlier era people like this referred to marriage as a “trap.” This is the man who called his wife “the old ball and chain” or “the warden.” This is the woman who referred to her husband as “my jailer” or “my keeper.”

For active runners these words are not mere exaggerations or small jokes. They accurately portray the feelings of intense discomfort that occur whenever someone gets too close.

When people talk about serious commitment problems, they are usually describing someone like Brad. At thirty-nine Brad has been married once, broken one engagement, lived with two other women who hoped for marriage, and has had scores of other relationships he would describe as serious. In between his “serious” romances Brad has had more than a few experiences with women with whom he establishes emotionally intense romances that last only a short period of time. When ending relationships Brad has frequently fallen into the “Houdini” model. Without explanation he stops calling and/or neglects to return phone calls. He may even go so far as to unplug the phone altogether in order to avoid the woman who he
knows
is trying to reach him.

Listening to Brad’s history, it is apparent that his romantic life is a mess. But when a woman meets him—when he talks about how he needs closeness and communication—even when she knows about his pattern with other women, she finds it difficult not to believe that with her everything will be different. He says:

“I would be a total jerk if I said that I didn’t have a problem. Isn’t it obvious? At this stage I’ve come to see what I do, and I’m trying to change. I really am. However, that doesn’t mean that I want to get married in the near future. Maybe someday I’ll feel differently, but for now I realize that I don’t handle expectations
well. I don’t want to lead anyone on, so I try to tell women to watch out. I usually do this at the very beginning if I sense that they are getting involved, but to tell you the truth, more often than not they respond as if I were a flame and they were moths. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just don’t want to get pressured into anything.”

Brad, a dark-haired athletic-looking police detective, is a very attractive man. Articulate and funny, when he turns his full attention to a conversation, women get swept away by his enthusiasm and charm. When women are describing Brad’s M.O., the words they are most likely to use are intense, romantic, obsessive, and devastating. They find it difficult to understand when he says he feels “pressured” because at the beginning he is the one doing all the pressuring and seems sincerely interested in a deeply connected relationship. Nonetheless Brad says that with almost every woman he has ever met he has ended up feeling as though someone was “closing in” on him.

“I think a lot of this has to do with the biological-clock stuff. The most self-sufficient-looking woman in the world eventually reaches the point where she starts thinking about baby clothes. And that’s it. I don’t want it. I know the way I am. If I had a child, I would want to be responsible to it. And I would end up doing time until the child was old enough to fend for itself.”

Brad’s last relationship was fairly typical. It was with a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Phoebe. He says:

“I met Phoebe while I was still married to Linda…. I think because of that I was more vulnerable. My marriage to Linda was a mistake, and it lasted a very short time—less than three years. She’s a wonderful woman, but I never really loved her. She was, and is, my good friend. If I were going to have kids, I would have them with Linda. I could always count on her. In my line of work that’s very important. But there was never any real passion. She’s a nice woman, a schoolteacher. To be honest, she never turned me on. It’s not her fault. She’s very hurt right now, and disappointed. She needs to find someone who can give her what she deserves. I’ve told her that, but I don’t think she’s ready to hear it.

“With Phoebe, on the other hand, it was all passion, and I guess I got carried away and said a few things that Phoebe could interpret to mean that I was always going to be around. When I came
down to earth, I realized that Phoebe and I had no real future. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a wonderful woman. I just don’t feature settling down again so soon. I told her this, and I’m trying to restructure a new relationship with her—one where we don’t see each other except maybe once a week, with no set schedule. That way maybe I can let her down easy.”

Brad’s work hours, which are unpredictable and erratic, give him a great deal of leeway in terms of scheduling his dates. He can go on a case for days at a time and basically be unreachable. Sometimes he only comes home to sleep, and there are times when he ends up not even doing that. He says he is aware that he uses this as an excuse for not staying in touch.

“If I decide I want to back away from a woman for a while, get a little space, it’s very easy for me to do it. I have a dozen legitimate excuses. I do work long hours. I do get involved. I am unreachable. It’s all real. Women get attracted to the cop stuff, but then they resent it. Normally, when I’m really into a woman, I check in regularly by phone. Then if I want to back away, I just check in less often. Sometimes I just don’t call someone for a couple of weeks. Then when we get together, she’s happy to see me. She’s been worried, so she’s not likely to go ballistic because I haven’t been in touch, and I think I’ve made it clear that I can’t always be accountable.”

Even though Brad acknowledges that he manipulates his relationships according to his whims, he prides himself on his sensitivity to women’s issues. He believes that one of the reasons women like him is that he is not afraid to express his emotions or to show his feelings. Therefore he is genuinely upset when the women in his life get angry. He doesn’t know what to tell them because he is as confused as anyone by his behavior in relationships. He feels so many things. He doesn’t like being alone, and he likes the feeling that there is a woman to whom he is connected, someone who cares whether or not he “checks in.” But nonetheless he doesn’t want her to expect anything or take anything for granted. He enjoys being intensely romantic with a woman, but when she responds by expecting the relationship to continue or wanting more of a commitment, he feels pressured.

When Brad hurts a woman, he feels tremendous guilt, but his behavior is hurtful by definition. He says that he wants things to
be equal in his relationships, but because he has set cutoff points and makes all the decisions about how far things can progress, neither he nor his partner can ever get comfortable with each other.

If you look clearly at Brad’s story, you see the subtext of a person out of control. He is running from one relationship to another while he perceives all women as potential threats to his freedom. His haphazard behavior can’t help but create chaos in the lives of the women he meets, and that in turn creates more confusion in his own.

A WOMAN’S CONFLICT

Women Brad’s age have rarely had the opportunity to act out their conflicts so blatantly. Typically they were told, and they believed, that they could do it all—have a career, family, marriage. If their lives have not evolved in this fashion, often they feel as though they have somehow failed. Although they may have some awareness that they are avoiding commitment, they may have fewer opportunities to date as they approach their forties. This obviously affects their perception of their own behavior.

At thirty-eight Regina readily acknowledges that she has run away from more than one relationship. However, it is only within the last year or two that Regina has started to see that she may have issues with commitment. An advertising copywriter, she has a job that has given her the economic security to buy a comfortable one-bedroom condo and a good automobile. Regina has nice clothes, she takes nice vacations, and she has recently started actively putting money aside in the hopes of someday purchasing a house of her own. When she graduated from high school, a woman like her would have been considered an anomaly. She says:

“I come from a real
Father Knows Best
kind of family; it was taken for granted that someday I would be married and have a family. I just didn’t know when. The first time I walked away from the possibility of commitment was when I was in college. I went out with this guy who adored me, and everybody assumed we would marry, but I found myself becoming more and more dissatisfied.
He was a very reliable guy, a very nice guy, but I didn’t think he was all that exciting, and I have to admit I gave him a very hard time. I would break dates and change plans. I would make excuses so I didn’t have to see him all the time.

“My parents were very annoyed with me. They used to accuse me of being too much of a feminist to want a husband. I used to be a real flirt, and there were always guys calling. It made my mother furious at me—she told me that playing the field was going to ruin my chances. Looking back, I realize my fiancé was probably the best man I ever knew, but then I felt as though he was limiting me and that if I stayed with him, I would be missing something. I didn’t want to lose him, but I wasn’t ready. I wanted marriage, but I wanted it sometime in the future. Now he’s happily married, with several children, and he makes tons of money. And yes, I’m sort of jealous.”

Regina, who is extremely attractive, has had more than her share of romantic encounters. After breaking her engagement, she moved to a large city, where she says she had a “terrific time” dating a great many men. She says that nothing got very serious and nothing lasted more than a few months, which was fine with her. Then, when she was in her late twenties, she had another important relationship with a man.

“At first I thought this would be ‘it.’ He was very romantic and at the beginning he seemed perfect, like the Prince, you know. Then out of the blue I discovered that he was misleading me—he was still married. He wasn’t living with his wife, but he had never bothered to get divorced, and he had no intention of doing so. I was devastated. Even though I started dating again right away, I was miserable.

“We didn’t see each other for a year, and then I ran into him one day on the street, and everything was different. We moved in together, he went through with his divorce, and he asked me to marry him. This time I was the one holding back. The passion was gone for me. And I hated living with him. It felt very confining. I got depressed and nervous and I was hysterical all the time. I felt as though my life was hopeless. I would think about being with him for the rest of my life, and I would immediately start fantasizing about other men. I decided he wasn’t smart enough for me
and he didn’t fit in with my friends. Anyway I guess you could say that I broke two engagements.