He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (4 page)

When they got home, she cried and told her mother. Her mother cried and told her father. Together they helped her tell her fiancé. It was a hideous experience. Afterward Susan felt that she should change direction, and she applied for and got a job in another city. That’s where she met Ben.

Ben was everything her fiancé wasn’t—poetic, interesting, spontaneous, and emotional. Like Susan he was looking for a place to live, and when he suggested that they find an apartment together, she jumped at the opportunity, even though she had known him a brief three weeks. She had never responded to anyone as strongly as she did to Ben. She quickly discovered that Ben’s intensity included long periods when he was in moody retreat, times when he stopped talking, withdrawing from her in all ways, including sexually. By now she was so wrapped up in Ben that his withdrawals made him seem even more fascinating. She soon became an expert on Ben’s psychology, his childhood, his fears, and his ambitions.

Because he was a musician, Ben spent many evenings away from home. Within six months hard evidence showed Susan that Ben wasn’t always working. She saw that he could be unfaithful, unreliable, and untruthful. A pattern was established: He didn’t come home, they fought, she cried, he retreated, she withdrew, they made up. Whenever he left the house, Susan suspected that he might be with another woman. Sometimes she was right, but even when she wasn’t, she was overwhelmed with anxiety. She worried that he wouldn’t return, she worried that something had happened to him, and she worried how she was going to break her dependency on him.

But then the relationship started improving; Ben became more
stable, and Susan began to have hopes that things would work out. Then, on the morning of New Year’s Eve, he approached Susan with a solemn face and told her that he was leaving. He had met somebody else and was considering marriage. Susan, who had made few friends in the city to which she had moved, went through a lonely depression that lasted for over a year. After Ben left, everything about him was infused with a rosy glow. Susan forgot the arguments and the painful nights alone and focused instead on the romantic beginning, the great sex, and on what could have been. In short, Susan was heartbroken, and her recovery from Ben took longer than the relationship had lasted. Eventually Susan’s memories of Ben began to recede, the world began to look a little brighter, and she met Tom.

When Susan and Tom started their relationship, this is what they knew about each other:

• Susan and Tom both knew about the other’s broken engagement, and each was sympathetic to the other’s feelings about not wanting to get trapped into an early, traditional, “boring” marriage.
  

• Susan knew about Tom’s relationship with Reba, and she admired him for wanting to take care of a woman and her children. She saw this as a sign of dependability. She sympathized with his withdrawal, because Reba was older and should have known that things couldn’t work out.
  

• Tom knew about Ben and felt that Susan had been abandoned by a creep who didn’t deserve her.
  

And so Susan and Tom started dating. At first Susan was available whenever Tom asked her out, and they saw each other three or four times a week. About three months into the relationship Susan started complaining that the relationship was too demanding—when Tom was with her, she didn’t have enough time to do her own stuff. Tom said that he had many of the same feelings and, citing pressure at work, suggested that they limit their dating to weekends for a while. That’s what they did for a month, but special events kept cropping up, and soon they were getting together mid-week as well. Once again Susan said the relationship
was moving too quickly, and although they agreed to stay faithful, they decided to see each other less frequently.

For the next few weeks they spoke on the phone every night, they continued to meet once mid-week for a quick dinner, and they still saw each other every weekend. The big change was that they no longer automatically spent the night together. During this time Tom had to take a business trip to San Francisco; on the flight he met an extraordinarily nice and good-looking woman. Nothing happened, but they talked the whole trip, they had a drink together, and it seemed to Tom that the woman had romantic intentions.

Tom didn’t want to be unfaithful to Susan, but he questioned what was going on between them. If he gave up other women and continued in a monogamous relationship with Susan, he felt the relationship should start moving forward. So he began to complain. He said Susan wasn’t giving enough to the relationship; he wanted more. She said she understood his point of view, but she wanted time. Time and space.

In the meantime they met each other’s parents; they met each other’s friends. Tom’s mother was thrilled. She decided that Susan was able to “handle” her son and that if she continued to give him enough rope, he would “hang himself” and propose. Susan’s mother thought Tom was a nice guy, even though he didn’t make as much money as Susan’s ex-fiancé. She worried that her daughter never gave anyone a chance and that, unless she changed her ways, she would end up an “old maid.”

As Susan and Tom tried to define their relationship, Tom continued to talk regularly to his airplane friend. He had already decided, however, that even if things didn’t work out with Susan, he wasn’t going to act on anything. This new woman had already indicated that she was anxious to meet someone, get married, and have a baby. Her baby agenda made him very nervous. Nonetheless she gave him the feeling that he was attractive to women, and this made him feel good about himself. Also Tom decided that it wasn’t so terrible that he and Susan only spent one or two nights a week together; it left him with more time for work.

Tom and Susan marked their first anniversary together. A month later, on an impulse after a particularly romantic night, Tom began to talk about marriage. Susan felt certain she wanted
to get married and she was absolutely certain she wanted children. And she knew she loved Tom. She just didn’t feel one hundred percent certain that Tom was the one she should marry, so she said, “maybe … someday.” This annoyed Tom, and he began pressuring for more of a commitment. Tom told Susan that he wanted to try to make this relationship work, and Susan said that if they could iron out more of their personality differences, she would consider marriage. But she is still concerned that they don’t have enough money and that Tom spends every cent he makes. She also thinks, although she wouldn’t tell Tom this, that he’s not quite well read enough for her.

Tom says it seems to him as though every week Susan finds a new reason why they should wait a little longer before they set a logical goal for the relationship. Susan says this is because she needs more time before she settles down. She also worries that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Tom wants to be with someone who fits into a traditional wife-mother mold, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be that kind of woman. When Tom is with her, sometimes she feels suffocated and burdened, much as she did with her ex-fiancé, but when she doesn’t see Tom for a few days or when he seems to be ready to give up on the relationship, she becomes terrified of losing him.

Tom thinks that because of her past experiences with men, Susan is unable to trust him. He is torn between wanting to prove that he is trustworthy and wanting to forget the whole thing. Much as Tom says he loves Susan, he is growing annoyed with what he sees as Susan’s withholding and he is thinking about seeing other women. He wonders, if he really loved Susan, would he be thinking about other women? And there is something else: when he thinks about the reality of marrying Susan, he begins to get a squeamish feeling in the pit of his stomach. Is it possible that what his friends say is true—that Tom is only interested in any woman so long as she is hard to get and that the minute it looks as though it could get real, he backs away? He says he doesn’t think so. He says he wants to settle down, but he wants to retain his sense of freedom too. In the right relationship he is sure he can have both. Is it possible that Susan isn’t the right woman for him either?

Does Tom have a problem with commitment? And what about
Susan’s difficulties with commitment?
What is going wrong in this relationship?

Here’s what we think: When it comes to establishing a working relationship, we think both Tom and Susan are unable to confront the contradictory quality of their behavior. This is spelled out by the choices they have made, by the choices they have avoided, by their pattern in and out of relationships, and by the words they use to describe their feelings. Both Tom and Susan claim that they want nothing more than to find Ms. or Mr. Right and settle down in a committed relationship, but we think they are unable to recognize how they are undermining this possibility.

Tom, for example, acknowledges that he may be unclear about what he wants. Because two other women have been very hurt by his actions, he has a fair amount of guilt about some of his behavior. Nonetheless he thinks a large part of his romantic past falls into the unfortunate-accident category, and he is certain that once he is married to the right person, all of his conflicts will disappear.

If anything, Susan finds it even harder than Tom to believe that she has any commitment issues. For example, she doesn’t think that her broken engagement proves anything except that her fiance wasn’t Mr. Right. She knows that at least two of the men in her life may have had issues with commitment, but she doesn’t see what that has to do with her. She is sure she wants a family. She remembers how committed she felt when she was with Ben and even how committed she was during her college crush. If either of these men had suggested planning a life together, she would have done so in an instant.

THE MALE-FEMALE DIFFERENCE

Acting out commitment conflicts is just one more thing that men and women sometimes do differently. Tom and Susan’s behavior patterns reflect some of those differences. They also point out how much easier it is for a woman to conceal her commitment issues from both herself and the rest of the world. There are two reasons for this: First, we have been conditioned to recognize the signs and attitudes of a man who is avoiding a committed relation
ship, but we have been so conditioned to believe that all “normal” women want marriage that we have not yet learned to recognize these same signs and attitudes in a woman. And in our society the man still does much of the initiating and choosing, and that makes it easier to see how his pattern is unfolding. We can look at the partners a man chooses and say, “See, she was all wrong. Bad decision.” It’s different for women. Since they are typically the responders, not the pursuers, it’s easier for them to disguise their conflicts under a wide range of excuses, such as “there aren’t enough men out there,” or “the wrong men keep finding me,” or “all of the good ones are taken.”

It doesn’t take a genius to say that “it takes two to dance,” but the sentiment is true nonetheless. A woman may feel more like the victim of a man with commitment problems than a perpetrator, but if she is involved with him, she is still dancing, and she is still participating. Her willingness to do so can reveal a great deal about her own issues with commitment.

It’s important to acknowledge that more and more frequently we hear of relationships in which it is the woman who is leading the dance away from commitment—or is, at the very least, an equal partner. Her behavior can be every bit as obvious as that of any man who has ever been accused of commitmentphobia or “cold feet.”

For both sexes the courage to commit goes hand in hand with building a loving, long-term relationship. If you resist examining your emotional history and the ways in which commitment anxieties may subtly, or not so subtly, be affecting your personal life, you run the risk of establishing and repeating self-defeating patterns.

ACKNOWLEDGING YOUR DIFFICULTIES

Whether you are a man or a woman, unresolved commitment conflicts reveal themselves in a myriad of ways. They are written in our fantasies and in our expectations, in our dreams and in our nightmares; they show up in the relationships we start and the relationships we avoid, in the people we choose and in the people who choose us. Within a relationship commitment issues show up
in the ways we handle everything from time and money to holidays and vacations.

Like Tom and Susan, many of us work long and hard to convince ourselves and everyone else in our lives that we don’t have any problems making a commitment. We always have an explanation as to why our relationships don’t work out, and typically that explanation has nothing to do with fear. We blame chemistry, we blame our culture, we blame the past loves who caused us pain, we blame circumstances, and most important we blame our partners’ problems. We put forth these explanations because we haven’t resolved
our own
conflicts.

LABELING THE COMMITMENT PROBLEM AND WHY THAT MAKES US UNCOMFORTABLE

As you read about the men and women in this book, you may find certain situations and patterns strikingly familiar, and yet you may resist wanting to see yourself as someone with “commitment problems.” We feel a great deal of your resistance may be directly related to a monster that we helped create.

When we wrote
Men Who Can’t Love
, we introduced the term
commitmentphobia
as a way of describing people who experience claustrophobic reactions to the notion of “forever after.” We believe the word to be descriptive and accurate, but we appreciate the point of view of those who argue that it is not a “real” word. We also understand the annoyance of those who complain that it sometimes seems as though one cannot pick up a magazine or turn on a television talk show without hearing someone referred to as a commitmentphobic.

For each of us, relationship experiences are unique. They are so complex and so varied that it’s hard to imagine that they fall under one label. To make them do so may feel unfair, judgmental, and almost insulting. None of us wants to think of ourselves as “types” of any kind, let alone commitmentphobic types. Nonetheless when external details are stripped away, human behavior tends to get reduced to a few basic dynamics. We believe very firmly that unresolved commitment conflict is one of these basic dynamics.