He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (20 page)

“If I’m being completely honest, I have to say that there were ways in which I always felt Brian slipping away from me. It was all very subtle, but it was happening. Maybe that’s why I rushed to move in with him. I guess I didn’t feel secure enough to let him out of my sight. I thought moving in would secure the relationship.

“I would say that he started overtly changing as soon as I settled in. Small changes. He stopped rushing home. He stopped automatically including me in everything. Some nights he would go off with his friends, and he wouldn’t get in until very late. And he started drinking more. When he was home, sometimes he appeared distracted and distant. But he still called me twice a day at work to tell me that he loved me. I thought all the little ways in which he seemed withdrawn were just natural reactions to a new situation.

“Before I moved in, we had discussed living together for six months; if that worked, we agreed we would then make plans to get married. When the six months rolled around, Brian began to hem and haw. He told me that he loved me very much but that the stock market was so unstable, it was making him too anxious to think about marriage. He said he needed more time. It made me nervous, but I didn’t want to pressure him. I tried to back off, but it was hard. I had some time off from work, so I went to visit a friend for a long weekend. That seemed to make things better, because when I came back, Brian said he really missed me. I found out later that in the five days I was gone, he had had a brief affair with another woman.

“We went on like this for another ten months. I tried to stop pressuring him, but every now and then I felt as though I had to find out if anything had changed. So, yes, I would bring up the subject of marriage. When we talked about it, he always said he wasn’t ready yet. I remember one night he said he still loved me but he didn’t know if he was ‘in love’ with me. We talked about it, and I thought we decided that his feelings were normal—that’s what happened when you had been living with someone for a while. That made sense to me.

“Finally what happened is that I don’t
know
what happened. We continued as we were; we made love two or three times a week, I made dinner two or three times a week, we went out to dinner on the weekends. We seemed to be having a reasonable life together. In fact it felt so committed already that I had stopped thinking about marriage, and we hadn’t mentioned the M-word in months. Everything seemed really cozy and solid.

“Then one weekend we went to the beach with a married couple. They were his friends, but I had become quite close to the wife. I thought we had a nice enough time, but on Sunday afternoon he seemed a little distant and went off for a walk by himself. That night, when we got back to the city, we both had sunburns, and the apartment was an oven. He turned on the air conditioner, and I went to get the cat, who was staying with neighbors. When I got back, he said we had to talk. He told me that the relationship was ‘over for the time being’—that’s how he put it. He said that he needed his space back. He said he was sorry and he knew this was a great strain for me. He thought I should try to get my apartment back.

“That night we slept in the same bed, but we didn’t touch. I must have cried all night long. The next day Brian said he couldn’t ‘take it’ and left to stay with a friend until I got myself more together. Finally after a couple of days of this I asked the neighbors if they could watch the cat, and I moved in with my sister and her husband until I got my apartment back. After I moved out, Brian called me and said that he still loved me and that he hoped we could be together again someday but that right now he wanted to be alone. He said that the breakup was difficult for him too.

“He never called me again, and I heard from friends that he was already serious about another woman. The same friends told me that he said that he loved me but that it couldn’t have worked out because there were too many ways in which we weren’t similar. I don’t know what he means by that. I remember that we could talk for hours and that we both liked the same things. I remember all the fun we had—and the sex. I can’t tell you how much this hurts me. I guess I still expect him to come back.”

Obviously Jessica has been deeply wounded by this aborted relationship. One day she was planning her days and spending her
nights with a man she loved; the next she was alone, with her cat, looking for a place to live. Yet Jessica acknowledges that she had a sense of Brian’s ambivalence throughout the relationship. In fact she agrees that she might not have been so quick to move in with him if she had been feeling more secure. And what about Brian? We’ve heard many variations of this same story over the years; every time we do, we ponder what was taking place in the man’s head. How could he be so casual about ending what appeared to be an important relationship? How could he encourage someone to alter her life without thinking about the consequences? Even if he changed his mind, how could he be so rejective and coldhearted?

LOOKING AT A RELATIONSHIP FROM THE OPPOSITE POINT OF VIEW

We recently spoke to Michael, a thirty-four-year-old attorney who has his own practice in Chicago. He described his relationship with Cheryl, a twenty-eight-year-old woman. It provides a glimpse into how a man with active commitment conflicts feels in this kind of situation, and we can very clearly see the different stages.

T
HE
B
EGINNING

Michael lived in Chicago, about five hundred miles from Buffalo, which is where Cheryl was working. When they met, according to Michael, there was an “amazing” attraction. He quickly began flying or driving to Buffalo every week to see her. Within a month they started seeing each other every other weekend, and spending a great deal of time on the phone. He says:

“At the very beginning, when we were highly attracted to each other and very fond of each other, she expressed her willingness to move to Chicago should a job opportunity arise. I remember I said, ‘That’s an awfully big step. If it doesn’t work out, you could end up feeling very frustrated. Are you sure you’re prepared to deal with that?’ She said that I shouldn’t worry about whether or not she could take care of herself. I took that to mean that she’s
mature emotionally and had things under control. I figured she knew what she was doing.

“Later as the relationship developed, I wanted to find out how compatible we were because seeing somebody under these conditions was not a very good way to get to know a person. At the time she moved in, no question about it, I was definitely in love with her. But it would have been better if she could have moved to Chicago to live in her own apartment. However, it was clear to me that she wasn’t going to come to Chicago unless she moved in with me. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that, but in my head it came down to choosing between having her move in with me or ending the relationship. She didn’t say that, but the feeling was implicit in our conversations.

“When she moved in, although I was happy about it, I was also filled with trepidation. I was nervous about making a level of commitment I didn’t feel I was ready to make. Unfortunately I didn’t express any of this to her because I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t love her. I hoped she was moving with the understanding that if it didn’t work, it didn’t work. I don’t remember if we specifically talked about that, either, or if I just hinted at it.

“I knew that she was leaving a very good job, but neither one of us properly evaluated how difficult it would be for her to find an equivalent situation in Chicago. I just figured she was a mature adult who knew what she was doing.”

T
HE
M
IDDLE

“At first I was delighted to have her in the apartment, but very soon I began to have these nagging little feelings of incompatibility. We had different attitudes about some stuff. It may have had something to do with sharing my apartment, which is pretty small. She was also worried because she was having a tough time solidifying a job offer. As I think about it, I realize that I can’t remember anything that big that we disagreed about, but I felt it.”

Michael says that although there were many things that he and Cheryl did that were a great deal of fun, there were also times when he feels they didn’t “click” as well as they should. He says that at this point he realizes his sense of being cramped for space was affecting him in general.

“The more I talk about all of this, the more I begin to wonder if
some of the things I think bothered me had less to do with those specific things and more to do with my feelings of being claustrophobic. I know that I began to feel caged in.

“Seeing each other every other weekend worked so well. It was like a vacation when we were together. It was purely for fun. Once we were together day to day, we didn’t always agree about everything. What finally happened is that after about six or seven months my father got sick and I had to fly down to Florida to see him. That made me think about a lot of things, such as family. I decided that part of my problem with Cheryl was religion. She wasn’t Jewish, and if I had kids, I would definitely want them to be raised Jewish.”

T
HE
E
ND

“When I came back, I was happy to see her. We talked a lot about what I was going through, and the question of children came up. I guess I voiced my concerns. She said she would be willing to raise our children in the Jewish faith if that’s what I wanted. Later that night I found myself lying wide awake in bed thinking,
What the hell is going on here? This isn’t working
.

“I realized that she was waiting for me to propose to her, and I couldn’t tell her that I was going to be able to make that commitment any time in the next twenty years, if ever. And that’s when it began to crumble. I couldn’t have felt any more trapped. It was nice to know that she loved me enough to have my children and raise them any way I wanted, but it didn’t overcome what I felt. In fact that conversation confirmed that neither of us really understood each other’s position when she moved to Chicago. She was ready to get married, and I wasn’t—and I might never be ready. The knowledge that we were on totally different tracks built up and built up, and it was too much to deal with.

“For the next couple of weeks I spent a lot of time thinking. I was feeling tortured because I knew the right thing to do was to break up with Cheryl, but I didn’t really want to do it because I had so many feelings for her. I was looking for all the differences that would make it easier for me to decide to split up. I still loved her, but I was having these anxiety attacks that forced me to resolve the situation. Finally one evening I decided that I had to do it.”

T
HE
B
ITTER
E
ND

“I told her when we were on our way to falling asleep. There was no preparation—I just told her. She was very upset of course. She didn’t really have any clear sense about how I had been feeling. She knew I was having some problems, but the idea of breaking up pretty much came as a surprise to her. And she had to move again, which was a great strain on her. Afterward she was angry, resentful, sad, and weepy. I felt both relieved and terrible. Terrible for putting her through that, but relieved because it was such a burden off me. I didn’t enjoy making her life miserable, but once she was out of the apartment, I felt as though this weight came off me. She didn’t want the relationship to end, so I felt bad that she was so unhappy.”

CHANGING ROLES

Michael is one of those people who seem to switch back and forth between active and passive commitment conflicts. In other words he is either running away from an available partner or running after someone who is unavailable. Soon after Michael’s relationship with Cheryl split up, he met Mary Lou, whom he says he was “crazy about.” In this relationship she was the one who was resisting commitment, and he was the one who wanted more. It’s ironic that Michael felt so strongly about staying within
his
faith, because Mary Lou, a Protestant, was clear from the beginning that she wanted to stay within
her
faith. He says:

“When Mary Lou and I met, we were both in heaven. I really flipped for her. She was the kind of person who appealed to my imagination. She was driven, strong, dynamic, and intelligent. It was so hard to pin her down that I was blinded to other women. She said that I was very different from the other men in her life. What I think she meant by that is that I tried always to treat her with respect and dignity. I tried to be supportive and sympathetic. I think that’s what she needed, but she didn’t place any value on it.”

Michael says that this relationship was very brief, and it ended because Mary Lou suddenly turned on him.

“She began to get very argumentative. I felt picked on a lot. It
seemed as though she was hunting for ways to find fault and hunting for ways to get me upset, and I always felt as though I was being pushed into a fight. Finally she announced that we were totally incompatible, and she dropped me like a hot potato. One weekend she was telling me that I was everything she ever dreamed of. Then all of a sudden I felt as though she had turned into a monster. It was so sudden and so total that I was stunned.”

Michael says that he recognizes that what Mary Lou was feeling was very similar to his reactions to Cheryl.

“It was very close to what I had done with Cheryl, so I understood it. But it still didn’t feel good. It didn’t make me heartbroken at first, just heart bruised. But every now and then I find myself thinking about Mary Lou, and I get this knot in my stomach.”

THERE WERE ALWAYS TWO VOICES IN MY HEAD

Oliver, a tax consultant, talked to us about a relationship that had a similar dynamic, but the relationship stretched out for several years because Oliver was unable to resolve his ambivalence.

“When I met Louise, a divorce lawyer, I thought she was incredibly sophisticated and glamorous. She knew exciting people, she went to chic restaurants, she wore designer clothes. I thought,
I want that
. And I chased her like crazy.”