He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (21 page)

Louise was five years older than Oliver, and for that reason, among others, she wasn’t sure she and Oliver had a future. Oliver says that nonetheless he convinced her.

“I planned a campaign, like a little war, to win her over. I did everything I could, until I convinced her to go to bed with me. The minute I did, she changed, or I changed, or I saw her differently. Within a few days it was a whole different relationship, and I wasn’t so sure this was what I wanted.”

“For one thing it turns out that Louise was really a homebody. She worked hard all day, and she wanted to come home and relax. She was a fabulous cook, and she would make me these incredible meals, which I should have appreciated. And I did. But—I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in a real relationship; it felt too
much like playing house. I had feelings for her, but I didn’t feel right.”

Oliver says that almost as soon as he “won Louise over,” he started having serious doubts. He says:

“We would spend three or four days at a time together, and I remember how tormented I used to be every time I left her house to go home. I always felt as though I should break up with her at those times. On the one hand I loved her; on the other I would wish that I could tell her that I wasn’t really committed. I would be having these conversations with myself about all her good points and all her bad points.

“The relationship lasted two years, and during the entire time I was struggling with trying to make a commitment. She sensed my ambivalence—that made her insecure, and she wanted some assurance that the relationship was moving forward. I would have these sobbing sessions with her in which I would promise that soon I would be able to make more of a commitment. She would give me ultimatums and threaten to end the relationship, and even though five minutes earlier I was trying to find a way to exit gracefully, once she made that choice real, I would cry and beg her just to give me more time.

“By the end I was really in so much conflict that I couldn’t move. I would invent excuses so that I didn’t have to see her so often. When I would come over to her house, she would make dinner and wait on me, and I would sit around feeling and looking uncomfortable. We would have these awful conversations about when we were going to make a commitment. Through it all there were always two voices in my head. I would tell myself that she was a good person who loved me, she was somebody I could count on, she had an interesting life, interesting friends, and she was my best friend…. I could do a lot worse. The other voice would be saying,
Get out, date, meet new women; live, see the world, you’re too young to die
.

“When I was with her, I would invariably start thinking about all the different kinds of women I might be interested in. She was tall, so I started fantasizing about petite women. I looked at women who didn’t have careers, women who didn’t cook, women who were different from the way she was. In short any woman who didn’t make me feel as though I was suffocating, which is how
being with her made me feel. Of course in reality I probably wouldn’t want to marry any of these women, either, but at the time I felt as though Louise was keeping me from meeting them. That made me more than a little angry.

“I think what I hoped was that some miracle would happen and make me feel different. I hoped I would somehow suddenly ‘grow up’ and be happy about making a commitment. But it didn’t happen. What finally did happen was that I started withdrawing sexually. We went on a vacation together for ten days in Europe, and we only had sex once. Every night I’d roll over and pretend to sleep. I had decided that if I didn’t stop having sex with her, I was going to have to marry her. I know that’s crazy, but that’s the way I felt. That’s when she got most upset. She said I made her feel ugly and undesirable. She said I was torturing her. Again I cried and begged.

“Then about two weeks after we got back, one night I had one of those ‘If I don’t get out now, I’ll die’ thoughts, and I followed through on it. I announced that I couldn’t be in the relationship anymore. She said I had given her no real warning. And in many ways I hadn’t. She had sensed my ambivalence, but when she’d tried to talk about it, I would basically deny it. I always told her that I loved her. And I did. My reservations I kept to myself because if I told her about them, she might have done something to change.

“This sounds awful, but I knew I didn’t want her to remedy anything. I wanted to get out. That’s all. If she had tried to do anything else for the relationship, or me, I would have felt even more guilty. I didn’t want it to work. I wanted to be free. It was that simple.

“After all that the relationship still wasn’t completely over. Believe it or not I was still ambivalent—only less so. We continued to see each other off and on for another year before she finally became totally fed up. I don’t blame her.”

“I LOVE YOU, BUT …”

As Oliver points out, his relationship with Louise is an exercise in ambivalence. He always felt as though he loved her, but….
In fact there is probably no better example of commitment ambivalence than the use of the simple phrase “I love you.” Some men and women with commitment conflicts never say it. They might say, “I really care for you,” or “I feel very strongly about you,” or “I really like you a lot”—but never the big one. They can’t even fake it.

But many more people with very obvious conflicts have no problem saying, “I love you.” They love saying it, at least for a while. In fact at the beginning of a relationship they may bury their partners in the phrase. Then, when the relationship gets serious, there’s a shift. As commitment begins to be expected of them, they stop saying, “I love you” and start saying, “I love you, but …” For example:

“I love you, but I need more time.”

“I love you, but I can’t live with you.”

“I love you, but we’re too different.”

“I love you, but you’re too good for me.”

“I love you, but I love Andrea/Andrew more.”

“I love you, but it would never work out.”

“I love you, but I have to marry someone else.”

“I love you, but I need to work things out.”

“I love you, but I need to be alone.”

“I love you, but my career isn’t far enough along.”

And let’s not forget the classic “I love you, but I’m not
in love
with you.”

Frequently men and women with active commitment conflicts don’t articulate any of the
buts
. They say “I love you” to their partners; the
buts
they reserve for their conversations with themselves.

What’s particularly unfortunate about these conflicted sentiments is that even when those with active conflicts do articulate all their reservations, their partners are likely to mishear or misinterpret. They hear the “I love you,” but they rarely pay adequate attention to the reservations.

SHORT-TERM FEAR

Of course not all commitmentphobic relationships last long enough for people to ever get around to discussing permanence. Joy, a thirty-five-year-old photographer, describes a brief relationship she had with Aaron, a forty-three-year-old college professor. This provides an excellent example of a short-term relationship that fits into the pursuit/panic mold. In it Aaron’s attitude goes through an amazing transformation. Many women have experienced this kind of brief and confusing encounter. Joy says:

“Aaron must have asked me out about two hundred times before I said yes. When he first started asking, he was married. That’s why I said no, even though he must have called me once a week for a year. Then I stopped hearing from him. I heard about him, though—from mutual friends. It seems he had started this heavy affair. That’s what made his wife ask for a divorce. After he separated, he developed this really terrible reputation around his office because he was going out with two women at work as well as a few more that he had met at academic conferences. One of the women from work was said to be very, very upset and making scenes in the office.

“I knew he wasn’t being wonderful to them, but I met two of those women. One I didn’t think was that bright, so I figured that was his reason for dumping her. The other had really dirty, stringy hair, so I figured she was a slob, and I excused his behavior. Little did I know.

“Finally we ran into each other again at a party, and this time there was no reason for me to say no. I was with a man who was just a friend, but I found out later that Aaron didn’t know that. He was with a woman, and he told me they were just friends. It later turned out that they were ‘sleeping together’ friends. Anyway, I was dancing, and he came over and asked me to dance. He said, I feel as if ‘I’ve spent my life waiting to dance with you.’

“The next day he called me and we went out for the first time. He seemed thrilled and excited to be with me. I asked him about all the stories I had heard about him, and he said he was probably going a little crazy after being in a bad marriage for so long. He convinced me that he wanted to start a serious relationship with me. He couldn’t stop telling me how much he loved looking at me
and how much he loved talking to me. We went to bed after a few weeks, and then all he could talk about was how much he loved sex with me, how much—how much.

“Once we slept together, the relationship lasted only a few more weeks before he stopped calling regularly. I talked to our mutual friends and found out that he had started seeing yet another woman. He told people in the office that he planned to see the two of us at the same time. The next time he called, I said no, and I told him why, and I asked him not to phone again. He didn’t call again, and I couldn’t believe it.

“I sound calm about this now, but at the time I was very, very upset. A couple of years later I ran into him at a conference, and we had coffee. He said that he realized that he had never been committed to his wife and that he didn’t want to be committed to anyone. He said that he was learning to be less of a ‘bastard’ with women, but that things had moved too quickly with me. He said that it had been obvious that I had wanted more from him than he was prepared to give. He said that one of the reasons he was attracted to me was that he thought I was very free and not likely to get dependent. That’s what he liked about me—that sense of freedom—and he said he was really surprised when I got involved emotionally. That’s not what he wanted. He didn’t ever again want a relationship that was connected.”

EVEN BRIEFER ENCOUNTERS

Sometimes all the stages of a commitmentphobic relationship seem to be played out in the course of one or two dates. We have spoken to some men, for example, who told us of going on blind dates, falling “madly in love” within minutes, and establishing a connection that was sufficiently intense that by the end of the evening they felt that the next step would have to be marriage. Rather than think of that possibility, they decided that the relationship would have to end before it began.

So many of us, particularly women, have been on the receiving end of this kind of behavior. We go out on a date with someone who seems so totally smitten that it lowers all of our defenses and creates powerful expectations that don’t seem unreasonable, but
then the phone never rings again. Where do all these Houdinis go? Are they all together in a room somewhere swapping stories? These are the kinds of jokes women make when they are together.

If you have ever wondered what went wrong when everything seemed so full of promise, it’s important to understand the dynamic that makes someone run when things are going too well.

WHEN A WOMAN IS THE ACTIVE PARTNER

The man isn’t always the active avoider within a relationship. Often it is the woman who is playing that role, but with a difference. Because we are accustomed to thinking of men as the pursuers and women as being pursued, more often than not we find ourselves acting out these stereotypical roles as we establish new relationships.

Men have been socialized to chase. They have been told they should be the hunters. Even though they often resent this position, they can be even more resentful of any woman who tries to reverse the roles. Women are still socialized to be “caught”; they are conditioned to wait for the man to act. They give indications of their interest—signals of their availability—but rarely feel comfortable pursuing a man in the same fashion a man would pursue a woman.

What does a woman with active commitment issues do? How does she set up a relationship in which she is doing much of the initiating and setting up most of the boundaries? Unlike a man, nobody expects her to make a thousand phone calls, send flowers and candygrams, play guitar under her beloved’s window. When a man does this, it’s considered acceptable male behavior.

Women with active issues typically set up a different style. When the relationship begins, they appear accepting or downright seductive. They end the relationship by withdrawal and rejection. In between they call the shots by setting up rules and boundaries that are impossible to overcome. Many men have been conditioned to believe that all women, by definition, are anxious to get married. When these men meet a woman who doesn’t fit this mold, they are often confused and shocked by what is taking place.

Andy says that he has a pattern of attracting women with commitment problems. He told us about a relationship that he says went through very definite stages. He describes Crystal as bright, beautiful, and self-sufficient. Unlike many women, Crystal seems relatively comfortable about assuming the role of pursuer.

He says:

“I met Crystal through my job. She worked for a company that I was doing business with, and for a few months I was in their offices on a regular basis. She came up to me in the hall and said, ‘I’ve heard about you—who are you anyway?’ So I introduced myself, and we started chatting. Every time I was there, we would talk a little bit.”

Because Andy was dating a woman with whom things were becoming serious, he made no attempt to ask Crystal out. But she had other ideas.

“One day she came up to me as I was walking out the office door and said, ‘You know, I really like talking to you. How about if we go to lunch sometime?’ We went to lunch and ended up spending two and a half hours together. I started walking her back to her office, and she said, ‘Some friends of mine are going out on Friday night. I wonder if you would like to join us.’ I was very flattered by her attention, so I said yes.