He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (10 page)

Theresa, a twenty-eight-year-old waitress and student, is an example of someone who falls in and out of commitment because of her rich fantasy life. She says, “I’ve been in lots of relationships. I’ve lived with four men and I’ve hurt all of them because I change my mind. At first the man always looks wonderful to me. And then I notice stuff I don’t like. My friends tell me that I’m hopeless, but I don’t believe it—I believe that someday I’ll meet a guy who really is perfect. At the beginning of all my important relationships I’ve felt as though it was karma. I always dream about marriage and babies, and yes, I guess I do tell the men that I want a family. At the time that’s what I feel. But then usually the man starts doing stuff that makes me want to get away.”

The “stuff” that Theresa refers to usually involves some form of “pressure” to get more committed. Theresa says that “everyone” also tells her that she is the same with work as she is with love. She came to school in southern California to study acting, but she found it boring, so she dropped out and took a job on a cruise ship. When she returned to shore, she enrolled in a course in management, but that was even more boring. Then she became interested in photography and enrolled in courses. Everyone agreed she had a real talent for it, but she had become more interested in sculpting. Right now she is taking courses in that, and she is thinking of moving to Europe, where she can enroll in art school full-time.

Meeting Theresa, one quickly forgets about her erratic history
with work and with men. She appears somewhat shy, and she says that she is very upset by the fact that she has “hurt” the men in her life.

“I sort of abandoned David, my last boyfriend. He’s having a difficult time getting over it. When we met two years ago, he was married. I really thought he was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with. That’s what I told him. But living with him was impossible. He was always asking me where I was going, and I just saw that he was different than I thought he was. At the beginning we were always having these romantic meetings because of his wife. It was different when we were in the same house day after day. He would watch football games, and he began to get this little potbelly. He would watch the evening news, and he’d want me to watch it with him. It was like living with my father. I don’t want an ordinary life. I don’t want to look over and see some guy scratching himself and eating chips. That’s not what I want. I know David doesn’t understand why I ended it. Of course I still have feelings for him, just not the kind of feelings he wants me to have.”

Craig, a thirty-six-year-old high school coach who says that he recognizes both his inability to commit and his capacity for fantasy, told us the following story. It is an excellent example of the use of fantasy to sidestep intimacy.

“Three years ago I met and fell in love with a woman who was all wrong for me. All of my friends told me, but I wouldn’t listen. I’m a very laid-back kind of guy, she was a very driven lawyer. I’m from a small town, she’s from the city. I’m Catholic, she’s Jewish. I don’t make much money, she makes tons. And money was very important to her. Nonetheless I decided that she was right for me, and I spent close to a year trying to convince her that this was the case.

“You understand that even though there was an incredible physical attraction, she had thrown up a thousand barriers against our being together permanently. Her job, her therapist, her family, her friends. I decided that if I could just get her away from all that to a place where she could see me at my best, I could work magic in the relationship.

“Years before, I had lived and worked out west. And I loved it. I always dreamed that when I met the woman I wanted to marry, I
would bring her out to Glacier National Park, and we would spend an idyllic time camping and hiking. The years that I lived in Montana were very important to me. Living there was addictive. It was a part of my development, and I was incredibly attached to it.

“I figured that she would be knocked out by the environment, by how much mastery I had of outdoor skills, and by my ability to get along in the great outdoors. I figured once I got her there, got her to relax, and got her to take a look at me in a different way, the relationship would move to a new plateau and everything would be all right. So I convinced her to take a ten-day vacation with me.

“Well, to make a long story short, my plan worked. She was totally disarmed by the place, and the strange environment made her totally dependent. If there was a noise in the campsite, I was like the great white hunter—you know, ‘It’s nothing, honey-probably just a grizzly—I’ll take care of it.’ She said that having someone take care of her felt wonderful. She was transformed.

“The second day we were there, the weather was perfect—not a cloud in the sky. We took a long hike, and she was thrilled by the mountain goats and the flowers. On the way back we crossed a little stream and there were all these elk standing in the water drinking. That night we went to this lodge overlooking a lake for dinner and we walked back to the campsite in the moonlight—probably not the brightest thing to do considering the grizzlies. I made a small fire and we toasted marshmallows and drank brandy. It was perfect. She was a changed woman—completely accepting and loving, and it was a changed relationship. As I went to sleep, I felt this incredible wave of relief. I was so happy. It was like bliss. That was the night I had ‘the dream.’

“I spent the night dreaming about a woman in high school that I had been desperately in love with and that I had never been able to get to first base with. When I woke up, my first thought was that I should immediately do everything possible to find my high school crush. She was the person I should be with. I looked over at my girlfriend, who was still sleeping, and I thought,
What the hell am I doing with someone who is so dependent on her shrink and her family?
She was all wrong for me. I was totally miserable. The face of the girl from high school settled in my head, and I couldn’t get
rid of it. She seemed more real to me than the woman lying next to me. She was somebody I could really focus on, somebody who was like myself, who wanted the things I wanted. She was the one I wanted. The woman I was with seemed like a foreigner to me, a complete stranger.

“While she was still sleeping, I got up, got dressed, and hiked up to one of the glaciers. It was a long hike—the whole thing, back and forth, took maybe four hours or more. When I got back, my girlfriend was furious. She said I had betrayed her trust. And she stopped speaking to me. That brought me back a little bit, but it wasn’t the same. There was so much anger that we cut our camping trip short.

“We resolved things between us for a while, but after that dream I could never get back to feeling the same way. Whenever I was with her, I would begin to feel depressed. It took another six months for the relationship to wind down, but that was the turning point.”

Both Craig and Theresa have traditional attitudes toward marriage and commitment. Both say that they are eager to find the right person, settle down, and raise children. Yet, like many people with commitment conflicts, the minute they get a clear sense that another person is genuinely there, they start questioning the relationship and the person. They start feeling constrained and trapped. Those feelings create anxiety and a need to get away. And within a very short period of time—sometimes immediately—they are ready to move on to a new fantasy.

WHEN THE FANTASY FADES

Some people get into relationships and don’t think about words like “till death do us part” and “forever.” They are able to view relationships as a process, taking them one day at a time, worrying only about one day at a time. Simply put, these people have fewer conflicts and are less overwhelmed by the notion of losing their freedom.

Typically these fortunate men and women understand that people are not always perfect and that any relationship or marriage, even with two well-intentioned partners, can have problems. This
attitude doesn’t mean that these people don’t care for their mates or that they don’t work hard at their marriages. Quite the opposite. They may have fears about commitment, but the fears are realistic. Not surprisingly these people’s relationships often pass the test of time.

Men and women with serious commitment conflicts are unable to behave in this fashion. When the fantasy fades, they can’t move forward in a realistic, loving relationship. They may also believe they should take the next logical emotional step and embrace a settled permanent relationship, but their need for distance prevents them. What they are feeling most strongly is a need to get away, to seek new horizons, and often new partners.

CHAPTER THREE

Runners and Chasers—Active Commitment Conflicts

Recently Mitch, a self-employed architect, walked away from an important relationship because he couldn’t make a commitment. This brought him in touch with his fears. At forty-five Mitch now believes he can review his romantic history with a degree of clarity that wasn’t possible when he was younger. Looking back, he sees a pattern; he sees the two women he lived with, proposed to, and failed to marry, and he’s aware of the hurt and disappointment these relationships generated. He sees the other women he pursued for a short time before changing his mind, and he realizes that his feelings—and behavior—were contradictory and confusing. He realizes, from all-too-solid experience, that he becomes anxious and critical when anyone gets too close or expects too much. He knows that once he dates a woman more than a few times, he suspects her of trying to trap him into marriage. And most important he can no longer tell himself that this situation will be cured by “the perfect woman,” because he has pursued and ultimately rejected any number of women whom he initially thought were “amazing.”

Although she is only twenty-nine, Diane, a computer salesperson, is as aware of her commitment issues as Mitch is. She has always found the idea of marriage foreign and a little scary. When she was a little girl, playing with her friends, whenever they discussed the future and their dreams of someday getting married,
she would find herself pushing the idea away. She is still pushing the idea away. She knows that she places limits on all her relationships, and although she has an easy time meeting men, she never lets a relationship develop into an easy intimacy.

Diane’s pattern is to make her time and space needs known from the very beginning. She has found that men usually resent this; consequently she is often lonely. She doesn’t like this, but she also can’t handle a romance that places too many demands on her. She doesn’t know what the solution is and hopes that someday she will meet the perfect partner with whom she will be in complete accord on how much they should be together and how much they should be apart. Until then she continues to wrestle with her fears.

Patrick, a stockbroker, is much less aware of his conflicts. At thirty-two he doesn’t see a clear pattern. All of the women he has loved appear to be very different. He wanted to marry Bonnie, for example, but she was still in love with her old boyfriend. He was very eager to continue his relationship with Suzanne, but she was determined to move back to her native France, and his occupation was hardly movable. Gwen, the other major love of his life, broke it off with him after two years, saying that he wanted more than she wanted to give. Patrick says his problem is that the women he meets don’t appreciate nice guys.

Ellen is certain that it is the men she meets, not her, who have a problem with long-term involvement. At thirty-nine she sees commitment only in the context of marriage and says the reason she has never married has a great deal to do with timing and the luck of the draw. There were men who wanted to marry her, but never when she wanted to marry them. She says she expects a great deal from any man she eventually marries, and this presents a problem for some men. Right now she is harboring a secret crush on a married man in the office where she works. The gossip around the office is that this man, who fans Ellen’s feelings by being incredibly seductive and flirtatious, is outrageously unfaithful. Despite her high expectations Ellen sees that she has a pattern of “falling” for men who are unavailable, inappropriate, or unable to
commit. However, she can’t believe that this has anything to do with her own conflicts.

We recognize that there are all kinds of ways to run from commitment, and there are all kinds of people who employ these different ways.

Mitch, Diane, Patrick, and Ellen are all very different. Each has a unique style and way of behaving in relationships. Let’s look at these styles, taking gender differences into account, and see if we can find the pattern. All of these people typically have behavior patterns that can be described in one of two ways:

• Active avoidance
  

• Passive avoidance
  

The active ways of running away from commitment are fairly obvious. If you recognize that the very notion of commitment makes you uncomfortable, if you never get seriously involved, or always place limits on the amount of intimacy you allow in your life, and if you are always ambivalent, it becomes pretty apparent over time. But there are also passive, or not-so-obvious, ways of avoiding love—ways that don’t make you feel as though you have a problem. Active and passive commitment issues manifest themselves so differently in relationships that it’s sometimes difficult to recognize that they are both part of the same syndrome.