He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (2 page)

Monogamy
is a necessary ingredient in any committed relationship. We know there are those who disagree with this and who feel that it is too conservative or traditional a value. We know that there are couples who maintain that they are committed even though they have agreements that allow for sexual activity with other people. Nonetheless we firmly believe that monogamy is part and parcel of commitment.

By open-ended we mean
open to the possibility of continuing the relationship indefinitely
. An open-ended relationship allows for growth and change, while it protects the emotional investment of both partners. To us, being open-ended means more than just staying together as long as the relationship is working, to us it also implies the desire to make it work. Being open-ended means being able to look to the future with possibility and not with terror.

You can’t have true commitment without
responsibility
—responsibility to the relationship, to one’s partner, and to oneself. Responsibility means many things. It means not promising more than you can emotionally deliver and it also means not holding back emotions you are capable of giving. Being responsible is a promise to stay sensitive to your partner’s feelings, and it is an implicit agreement not to run away just because you get scared.

Finally a
realistic
attitude is essential to commitment. To be committed to someone means being able to dispense with fantasy and see and accept your partner’s faults, foibles, weaknesses, and imperfections.

Well-intentioned, monogamous, open-ended, responsible, and realistic—these are the qualities that reflect a willingness to stay in the relationship and keep working at it even at those times when it would be so much easier to quit. That to us is commitment.

SOME REASONS FOR READING THIS BOOK

Typically it is the people who care about us who point out our problems with commitment. In fact some of you may be reading this book at the request of friends who believe that you are running away from an important relationship. Perhaps you are responding to other friends who tell you that you are always too “picky” to form any relationships. If that is the case, please understand that we don’t mean to sound judgmental. If you’re afraid, naturally you feel conflicted. This does not make you a horrible person or an anomaly or a psychological misfit. You are simply someone who struggles with this fear. We hope that looking closely at the ways this fear operates in your life will illuminate for you some aspects of your conflict and your behavior in relationships.

Some of you may be reading this book because you care deeply about a partner who is running away from love. We know how distressing that can be, and we will try to help you find new ways of dealing with your situation constructively. Years of conducting interviews have convinced us that people with commitment problems gravitate toward each other. Therefore we ask you to read this book with an open mind, allowing for the possibility that your own conflicts may be contributing to your unfortunate romantic choices. We sincerely hope that recognizing how commitment anxiety is affecting your life will help you make the necessary changes to get the love you want.

OUR MISTAKE: NOT GIVING ENOUGH WEIGHT TO WOMEN’S CONFLICTS

In 1987 we outlined the “commitmentphobic syndrome” for the first time in our book
Men Who Can’t Love
. We are extremely proud of that book because we feel it has helped a lot of people. But we now realize that it was a mistake not to talk more about women’s fears. Sure, we
mentioned
that women can put up barriers against commitment, but after giving this point brief lip service, we then turned our attention to what we considered to be a more glaring issue.

Although the interviewees for
Men Who Can’t Love
were chosen at random, few women—if any—told us that they experienced commitment anxiety. Instead they had story after story about men who had walked away from love. Men, on the other hand, although they had ample opportunity to discuss women who had avoided commitment, failed to do so. Instead they were most articulate when discussing their own anxieties.

This has changed. A far more skeptical generation has come of age. They have seen and heard enough about divorce and the fragmented family structure to be much more sensitized to the issues surrounding commitment. In the last eight years, since we first started interviewing people about commitment conflicts, we have noticed a marked and profound change in attitude. Women now have a stronger sense of independence and of their own power, and more of them are questioning the merits and weighing the downside of traditional relationships. As they do so, they become more aware of their own anxieties and how these anxieties may have propelled them to act out in relationships. The man who can’t commit has met his match in the woman who isn’t so sure herself.

If there is one thing that has become exquisitely clear to us over the past several years, both from the mail we receive and the people we’ve interviewed, it’s that men do not have the copyright on commitment anxiety. This syndrome transcends gender. Sure, tons of men have it. But plenty of women have it too, and their ranks are growing every day.

Initially it was easy to blame men for more of the world’s relationship struggles. Their destructive behavior was all too obvious. Today we know more and we know different. Today we are much clearer about the ways women’s commitment conflicts are played out in their choices, their beliefs, their feelings, their fantasies, and their behavior. The women we know are insisting upon assuming responsibility for their lives and their relationships. They resist being cast as victims and instead want to come to terms with the ways in which they participate in the dynamics of their relationships.

This doesn’t mean that we’re letting men off the hook, and it doesn’t mean that we’re forgiving men for all their destructive behaviors. We recognize that there are still far too many situations and relationships in which men hold an unfair advantage, and it’s important to continue to be aware of this.

But the years since the publication of
Men Who Can’t Love
have shown us that there is another side to the commitmentphobic dynamic, and that other side is a woman who, for reasons we will examine in this book, is participating. She may be actively participating or she may be passively participating. But she is participating.

We think it’s important to note here that there are a growing number of women who are realizing that they have put too much pressure on themselves to get married. Many of these women complain that they are tired of feeling guilty because they have not fulfilled parental or societal expectations. We don’t want them to feel more pressured by us. From where we sit, this book is not about staying single or getting married. It’s about understanding your patterns, making good choices, and avoiding destructive relationships.

OUR OWN STRUGGLES WITH COMMITMENT

We came to writing about commitment issues the hard way. We both have long histories of dealing with our own conflicts: our own anxiety attacks, our own flights from commitment, and our own relationships with partners who were running away. Writing is as much a personal exploration as it is a professional investigation, and it’s no secret that writers write about those matters that concern them. We are as affected by commitment issues as our readers. It is not our intention to separate ourselves or portray ourselves as being above the struggle. We are not therapists; we are writers. Our insights and our material represent eight years of interviewing men and women about their relationship experiences and their feelings about those experiences.

COMMITMENT IS A CHOICE

For all of us—male and female—commitment fears are part of the price we pay for having freedom and having choices. With freedom comes the threat of the loss of freedom, and it is this very threat that is so often at the core of the struggle with commitment. In and of itself, fear of commitment is not the problem. But if it’s hurting you it’s a problem, and if it’s hurting someone else it’s a problem.

It’s important for everyone—male and female—to become aware of how their behavior can hurt others and learn to modify it accordingly. For that reason we’ve included sections with suggestions for ways in which both partners in a relationship can modify their behavior.

Though commitment conflicts may be more obvious today than ever before, that doesn’t mean that everyone has given up on relationships. Many people want to know more about building and maintaining committed relationships, even in the face of their fear. They want to know how to push forward in spite of their anxieties. They want to know how to find the right partners, how to make themselves into the right partners, and how to work more constructively toward the goal of commitment.

Fear or no fear, people want relationships. And they want more meaningful, loving, and supportive relationships. We hope this book will help our readers achieve these goals.

PART ONE

When What You Want
Is What You Fear

“Every time we get close to commitment, one of us does something to ruin it.”

—JONATHAN, twenty-eight

“I panic at the idea of marriage and a family … I want love, but if I try to imagine what it would be like living in a house with an average husband and children, I feel nothing except terror.”

—MARCIE, thirty-two

“Barbara is a wonderful girl, but I’m not prepared to get married … at least not now. I don’t want to hurt her, but I’m afraid that’s going to happen. Either I’ll marry her and make her miserable or I won’t and I’ll break her heart.”

—DANIEL, thirty-six

“He wants more than I’m ready to give. I don’t want to lose him, but I wish he would stop badgering me about the future.”

—ANGELA, thirty-three

“Every man I’ve really cared about has run away from the closeness. Is it me? Is it them? What’s wrong?”

—NANCY, thirty-nine

“I’ve broken one engagement, left one marriage, and ended at least a half dozen serious relationships because I couldn’t handle commitment. I’ve got a great track record…. At least I’m honest.”

—ROBERT, forty-five

CHAPTER ONE

Whose Fear Is It, Anyway?

To one degree or another, all of us are torn between two fundamental urges. On the one hand, each of us has a profound desire to merge with another human being and become a part of something larger than self; on the other, we have an equally basic need to feel independent, free to make choices without constraint or compromise. Finding a way to balance the urge to merge with the desire to be free is what commitment is all about. Here’s the problem: These two needs are diametrically opposed.