He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (22 page)

“We went out with this group, and we went to a place where there was dancing. Crystal and I danced together most of the night. The next day, Saturday, she phoned me and said, ‘I just wanted to make sure you had a nice time last night. Did you?’ We ended up talking on the phone for hours. Before we hung up, she said, ‘You know, the company takes over a country club for a day every year’—this was going to happen the following week—‘Would you like to be my date?’ I said sure. So we went, and we had a terrific time. It ended up with more dancing. During the evening she told me that she had two tickets to a concert by a group I had said I liked. She asked me if I wanted to go. It was on a night that was tough for me, but I said I would adjust my plans, and I did.

“Then she called me and asked, ‘How do you feel about me?’ I told her that I liked her a lot. She asked me why I never asked her out. I told her it was because she never gave me half a chance—she asked me to do something before I could get the words out of
my mouth. I said, ‘Give me an opportunity and I’ll ask you out. In fact I’ll ask you out right now.’

Andy didn’t want to go out with two women at the same time.

“I was very up front with Crystal. I said, ‘Look, I’m seeing this woman, and we’re sleeping together.’ She said, ‘That’s okay.’ But she kept pursuing me. She sent me things. I was going away for a long weekend, and she sent me half a dozen little cards telling me to behave while I was gone because she was waiting for me. She would call me and leave these messages on my machine saying that she had called to hear my voice. Everything she did and everything she said made it very clear that her feelings were ‘Boy, you are the man I’ve been searching for.’ I found this very appealing. She is also a very, very desirable woman.

“Finally Crystal and I went out to dinner one night, at her suggestion, and in the course of dinner she said, ‘I feel we’re emotionally very close right now, but you’re not very physical with me.’ I repeated that I was sleeping with someone else, and besides, I told her, I like to establish an emotional base in a relationship before it gets sexual.”

At about this point, Andy says, he realized that he was tremendously attracted to Crystal, and she seemed really to like him. Therefore he decided (a) to break things up with the woman he had been seeing, and (b) to move to a new plateau with Crystal and start a sexual relationship. What he didn’t know was that Crystal was
already
sleeping with someone—an old boyfriend for whom she later said she had no feelings.

“Well, once I broke up with the other woman, I started trying to move the relationship with Crystal in the direction of sex. But as I became more interested in developing a sexual relationship, Crystal changed. It took us a month to get to bed, because every time we saw each other, she had reasons why she didn’t want to have sex. When we finally did, she was very different from what I would have imagined—mechanical, technique oriented, and essentially emotionless.

“Two weeks after the first time we went to bed, it was my parents’ anniversary party. I asked Crystal to come as my date. We went, and she appeared to be having a good time, but about a week later she told me that she had started having these ‘pangs’ and feeling uncomfortable when she was with me. She said she
wanted to get out of the relationship, but she realized that she had pursued me to such a degree that she had a hard time telling me she had changed her mind. I was hurt, but I said she should do what she was comfortable with, but then she called me and said something else. She said that she had trouble when she cared for somebody and would I please give her time.

“The relationship continued for another couple of weeks. Then one Friday night she was supposed to come over to my apartment after work. She never showed up, and she didn’t call. I called her apartment. I called some of her friends. No one knew where she was. I left messages on her machine, but she didn’t return them. Finally on Sunday she called. I was understandably very concerned and worried. She said that she had decided that we were better friends than lovers—there was no ‘chemistry.’ What she wanted was to continue seeing me, but she wanted to see other people too. She said that she needed that freedom.”

Andy says that Crystal was the master of the double message. For example, she told him that she thought that he was the perfect man for her, that he was everything she ever dreamed of, and that he had every quality she ever wanted in a man. The only problem was that Andy was “too emotional”—although she didn’t think that was such a big problem because she felt she needed to become more emotional herself.

“One minute she said I was everything she ever wanted. The next she said that there was no sexual chemistry. Anyway, I told her that if that was the way she felt, it was okay with me, and I basically withdrew.

“In the meantime, however, we had made plans to go down to Mexico for a week. We had the tickets and a deposit down on hotel reservations. She said that she would still like to take this vacation, but just as friends—no sex. I said okay, that I thought that we could do that. So we went down, and I made no overtures to her whatsoever. On the third night we got into an argument. I said, ‘You know, I don’t buy this sexual-chemistry thing. Something else is going on. What is it?’ She said, ‘You know what it is, really? I just can’t tolerate the obligations and the expectations that come with a committed relationship. I can’t tolerate the feeling of having to do something because I’m expected to.’

“The next night she got into bed with me and seduced me. It
was better sex than any we had had up to that time. Afterward she said that she wanted me to understand that this didn’t mean that we were having a relationship. ‘I said, Okay.’

“The next night we went for a walk on the beach, and she was hanging all over me, and we had sex on the beach. It was great. But the next day she told me that she was angry that we had sex. She felt that she had established these guidelines, that we were going to just be friends and I had ruined that. I was flabbergasted. She said that we’d better not have sex that night. So I said okay, and I stayed away from her for the rest of the vacation.

“When we got back, she immediately started dating somebody else, and we went back to being just friends…. But she vacillates. Sometimes she becomes very dependent on me and calls every day. She told me that she felt that she needed two men in her life. I was the emotional man, the other guy was the sexual one, and that she was purposely orchestrating her life to keep both parts separate. Sometimes this takes some very odd twists and turns.

“Even though she was seeing some other guy, we decided that we would have a drink to celebrate Christmas. She showed up at my house totally dressed up. Makeup, short skirt, the works. It was weird. And seductive. So I sat her down and said, ‘Look, this isn’t working out. You’re giving me all these mixed messages. You act seductive, I respond, then you say no, and I can’t handle it. I don’t think we should be seeing each other anymore.’ Well, she started to cry. She said, ‘I love you so much. I couldn’t stand being without you. Don’t break up with me now.’ I said, ‘This is really crazy! You said we weren’t seeing each other anymore. We’re not even having a relationship to break up!’ She said, ‘Don’t say anything more. Let’s just get through the holidays.’

“A month or so later we went out. We hadn’t slept together in months, but all of a sudden she started talking about getting married. I said, ‘Married! You can’t even sleep with me.’” She said that she could, and just to prove it, we went back to my apartment and had sex. Then she called me the next day and said, ‘You know, all of that talk about marriage—let’s forget it.’ I said fine.

“We slept together a couple more times, but then we stopped altogether. But she is still always flirtatious and sexual. And she starts up with me physically—a lot of foreplay, no sex. And she
still buys me presents, sends me little cards. You know the kind of thing a woman does if she really likes you. She tells me I’m the most important person in her life. Since we’re not together, that doesn’t seem to mean very much.”

SHE HAD TO SAY NO BEFORE SHE COULD SAY YES

Wes, a thirty-four-year-old advertising executive, says that he was devastated by a woman who he believes had serious commitment problems. He met her while he was in Washington on business.

“At that time I had a client in Washington, and I was there more than I was in New York. One weekend I stayed in Washington.

“I went out with a group of friends, and she was there—very pretty, very quiet … tall … sort of a Julia Roberts look. We all went out to dinner, and she didn’t say anything to me. Then we went dancing. The others all moved off together, so I asked her to dance. You have to understand this woman and I had never exchanged a word, but we hit the dance floor, and suddenly she was all over me. There was such intimacy in her body language that it knocked me over.
Wow
, I thought,
this feels really close
. We truly didn’t exchange five words that entire evening. Afterward we went out for coffee. Same thing. She didn’t speak, but when we got out on the street, she took my hand. She seemed shy and yet very aggressive and forward sexually. It was a completely disarming combination. So I asked her out.

“We went out to dinner, and it was very hard to talk to her, which made me think that it wasn’t going to work between us. One thing I remember is that she said her friends all told her that she was afraid of intimacy. I didn’t pay too much attention, though. Going home, on the street, she took my hand and sort of plastered herself up against me. She seemed so comfortable when she was close to me. It seemed very intimate to me. We kissed good night, and I was very turned on.

“We had talked about a magazine article I was reading, and the next day I called her and asked if I could bring it over. She said sure. When I got there, she was wearing this old T-shirt and short
shorts. She kept calling attention to her body, apologizing for her shorts. She made me coffee and she kept touching me. It was intoxicating to have that kind of physical attention. She suggested we go for a walk. It was a gorgeous spring day, and we walked down to the park near the river, and again she reached for my hand. When we got there, we sat on the grass, and she put her head on my leg. All of this stuff made me think,
Shit, this woman really likes me
. A big part of me wasn’t clear why she seemed to like me so much. We had exchanged very little information. And yet I was flattered. I remember thinking,
Oh, my God, I’m going to be spending my weekends this summer visiting her in the Washington heat. That’s even worse than New York
. I remember telling her that I was nervous about having to spend the summer working in Washington.

“The next time I went out with her, when I got to her apartment, she made this big deal about having just bought a new bathing suit, which she insisted that I see her in. She was talking about how we could go to her beach club in the summer. It made me feel as though she had bought the bathing suit just to please me—to keep me happy in Washington. After dinner we went back to her apartment, and she sort of jumped me. Even though there was a lot of physical contact, we didn’t have sex. I was uncomfortable with it. In my head I had a very traditional scenario that included waiting and going through stages.

“In the meantime she kept acting like we were going to be together. You know, she would talk about things we could do together, and trips we could take. During this part of the relationship she included me in her life: She introduced me to her family; she included me in her little decisions—like where to move the couch and how to put up her shelves. She asked me to meet her in a store so I could see this present she wanted to buy her mother. She wanted my advice about everything. She asked me to help her pick out some furniture she was buying for her bedroom—she wanted to have me check out the mattress. And the sex, which happened very quickly, was incredible.

“For about a month we had a very casual intimacy. It was easy and close. I was doing most of the phoning, but she was definitely waiting for my calls. And we were seeing each other every few days.

“Anyway one week I had to go back to New York. I was gone maybe five days. We talked every night, but when I got back, she was resistant. I didn’t get the sense of someone who was waiting to see me. In fact she told me that I called too often and she didn’t like it.

“That’s when there was a definite shift in the relationship. We started to have little disagreements, mostly because she was finding fault with me. There were a whole bunch of things about me that were suddenly not to her liking. She said I was making too many assumptions and that I wasn’t giving her enough time to herself. I tried to back off. This made it better, but whenever we got closer, she would withdraw. There was about a month of this kind of little back-and-forth stuff. I thought maybe if we took one of those trips she talked about, things would improve, so I made plans for the two of us, which she agreed to.

“Well, the ‘trip’ weekend came, and she said she’d changed her mind. She had ‘stuff’ to do. We hadn’t had a whole weekend together in several weeks, but at the last minute she couldn’t go away because she had to do laundry and paperwork. I was nuts. I felt totally slammed and hurt.

“So I fought with her about it, and that’s when her attitude really changed. She told me that she had never agreed to go anywhere with me. She said she needed her space and that she didn’t want to see me for a while. She blew me away.

“I guess she pushed the wrong buttons, because I became obsessed. All I wanted to do was talk. I needed to know what had happened to change the way she felt. I wanted her to face what went wrong and talk to me about it. I believed she still cared about me, but that she had problems. I thought we could work them out together. So I would call her every five or six days, pretending to be casual, looking for an opportunity to resolve our problems. When she didn’t see me for a while, she would warm up.

“Sometimes she would ask me over. She would tell me that she wanted to make it clear that if she saw me, we couldn’t sleep together. Then of course we did. It was like she had to say no before she could say yes. Or maybe considering the beginning, she said yes before she said no. It was very confusing.