He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (39 page)

If you haven’t slept together, it feels as if you could at any moment. In fact it feels as though a whole bunch of things could happen at any moment. But they never do.

Perhaps you fantasize that there are good reasons for this peculiar behavior. Perhaps “Elusive” has a dark secret, a shameful past. Perhaps “Elusive” is involved with someone else—someone unloving and cold. The possibilities are endlessly intriguing, but none is likely to be true. Chances are that “Elusive” is just terrified
of intimacy and this behavior ensures that intimacy will never happen, no matter how intoxicating the chemistry.

Great Challenges

To change and redeem another human being and in so doing to save yourself—that’s what it means to be attracted to partners who provide interesting challenges. There are so many ways in which someone can do this, all of them guaranteed to sidestep realistic commitments. Some of the most common:

T
HE
S
UBSTANCE
A
BUSER

You don’t really believe it’s a serious problem. You’re sure that with enough understanding and support you can convince your partner to attend a twelve-step program. Maybe you believe that if you are perfectly loving, perfectly understanding, perfectly exciting, the problem will disappear by itself once the relationship is strong enough.

T
HE
W
OMANIZER

You ask him if he’s a man who can’t love. He says, “That’s not my problem. I love too much.” He has a wife and a girlfriend, or two girlfriends or three. No matter how many women he’s seeing, he swears he loves them all. Although he talks about the joys of commitment, he is a full-time juggler—womanizer of the year. Your challenge: Make him monogamous and get him committed.

T
HE
F
ULL-TIME
F
LIRT

She goes out with a lot of guys and she’s having a terrific time. Although she talks vaguely about babies and a house in the country, right now she is packing her bags for Spain. She’s cute, she’s adorable, and she loves her freedom. Your challenge: Make her into a stay-at-home wife.

T
HE
T
ORTURED
S
OUL

He’s a brilliant novelist, she’s an angry poet, he’s a depressed painter, she’s an angst-ridden environmentalist. The torment in his or her head is the stuff of great foreign films. Ever catch yourself thinking,
Is this person ever
not
miserable and unhappy?
Ever feel
guilty for not being deep enough, or global enough, or caring enough? Well, enough’s enough. Whatever the cause that gives “Tortured” so much distress, the emotional connection these people have to their discomfort makes them unavailable to their partners.

M
R. OR
M
S
. I
NDECISIVE

One voice tells him you’re the one, but another keeps whispering that he should keep looking. She loves you, but she really cares about him too. Can’t you please be patient and understand?

Whether your beloved is torn between two loves or two lifestyles, he or she seems to be in the throes of a struggle with demons you can’t understand. But you stay. In fact you participate in the contest. You may almost feel as though you are fighting for someone’s soul, and you’re convinced that your rivals are inferior, so you do whatever you can to prove that you are the worthier love. And it goes on and on.

Caught between two needs, “Indecisive” has discovered a perfect way to avoid a real, live human relationship while still getting a whole lot of real, live human attention. It may feel chaotic, but it’s an exquisite kind of chaos. It must feel pretty good for “Indecisive” to know there are so many options available.

T
HE
C
RITIC

You say tomato, she insists it’s tomahto. You say potato, he says you’re eating too many carbohydrates. Something is always wrong with what you’re doing, what you’re wearing, what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. Something is always wrong with who you’re with, where you live, what you like, what you need. It’s never right, it’s never enough. Something is always wrong.

If you are with someone like this, it feels like you’ll go to your grave trying to get your partner to tell you how wonderful you are. You could clearly spend the rest of your life struggling to win his or her approval, What a challenge!

What’s going on? If you can’t win, if you never feel totally accepted, you’ll never feel a true sense of commitment. And maybe a part of you wants it that way. Yes, your partner is impossible. But don’t let that hide the fact that you’re willing to put up with it … whatever your reasons are.

T
HE
I
RRECONCILABLE
D
IFFERENCE

Some people have a pattern of setting up relationships in which there is already a great deal of distance between the partners. It seems apparent to everyone that this spells trouble for the long term. For example, your values are so different that you can’t have a conversation without an explosion. You genuinely believe that you could never marry because it would kill your parents. It’s against the teachings of your faith. Your cultures, attitudes, backgrounds, politics, and ideas are worlds apart. It would be unfair to your children. You don’t speak the same language, literally or figuratively. The age difference is crazy. Whatever the explanation, the translation is the same. This person is not appropriate for a close relationship, except in your fantasies. There, in your head, everything gets resolved. Your parents calm down. One of you changes religion, political affiliation, or ethnicity. Your children grow up.

If you’ve got commitment conflicts, there is something truly wonderful about being with a completely inappropriate partner. You can have a deep, loving relationship and feel totally committed while still knowing on some level either that ultimately it has to end or that this person is so different, it will never be genuinely close or intimate.

The problem with this kind of relationship is that it never seems to work out smoothly. Chances are that one of you will get deeply involved and ultimately come to see the obstacles between you as challenges worth overcoming. Unfortunately it’s unlikely that you’ll both feel that way at the same time. Typically at least one of you couldn’t have gotten involved if those obstacles weren’t in place.

START LOOKING FOR REAL PEOPLE

A large part of resolving your commitment conflicts is bringing different kinds of people into your life. If you want a long-term relationship, you need to concentrate on meeting potential partners who are capable of relating. We know that people like this exist. It’s up to you to start allowing yourself to seek out and respond to a different type than you are accustomed to. In order
of importance make a list of real qualities that you want in a mate. Keep it concrete and attainable. Your list, for example, may look something like this: Loving, honest, dependable, humorous, accepting, communicative, attractive, intelligent, down to earth, emotionally available, etc. When you meet someone new, make sure that person has qualities that match those you consider most important. If you are continually attracted to people whose qualities don’t even come close to matching the ones on your list, put on the brakes and think about what you are doing. If, for example, you say you want someone who is practical and honest, with traditional family values, yet you are always trying to reform pathological liars and sex addicts, you have to come to terms with the ways in which you are sabotaging your own life.

FACE YOUR CONTROL ISSUES

Commitment means compromise. That means learning how to live with and make equal decisions with another person. If one partner controls a relationship, financially, emotionally, or otherwise, the partnership is unequal. So try to understand the obvious and hidden ways in which you attempt to control your relationships and the ways in which you allow yourself to be controlled. If control plays a large part in your life, you might want to consider exploring its possible psychological origins. You may need professional help in protecting yourself from controlling partners, or you may need guidance in learning how to manage your own impulses to control.

GIVE UP UNWORKABLE FANTASIES AND STOP RUNNING AWAY FROM YOUR REAL LIFE

Everyone has dreams and everyone has fantasies. It’s normal and it’s healthy. But instead of inspiring us, sometimes our fantasies get in our way and hold us back from having a real life. If your pursuit of elusive dreams has veered you away from satisfying, reasonable partnerships with reasonable men and women
and drawn you straight into damaging relationships with extraordinary jerks, then your fantasies aren’t serving you well.

If you want to help yourself, you should try to understand how your fantasies got constructed and how much you have vested in them. Fantasies that take us away from reality are sometimes seized upon as a solution to pain we couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with. We fantasize about “special” partners because they make us feel more special, something we don’t seem always to be able to do for ourselves. But there comes a time when we need to come to terms with who we are right now, not who we could be if our fantasies came true. There comes a time when we must find more power within ourselves so that our fantasies don’t have such a powerful grip on us. We fully understand that often the real world is nowhere near as exciting or involving as an active fantasy. But ultimately it’s much more fulfilling.

MAKE A COMMITMENT TO BEING PART OF THE WORLD

Perhaps the final stumbling block to commitment is the largest one of all because it means accepting your place in the human continuum. We feel this point was best expressed by the writer Anatole Broyard in an article we read several years ago. He wrote, “Commitment means agreeing to have not only an honest relationship with another human being, but with the human condition itself. You have to take them together, because one means nothing without the other.”

As we see it, in order to have a real life, you have to be prepared to make a commitment to society, to community, to your values, and to your spirituality. You have to see yourself as part of something much larger than yourself or the couple. You have to be prepared to take your place in the continuum of human history.

This is a very difficult step because it means accepting your limitations and accepting your mortality. But so long as any of us needs to see our individual path in life as separate from and above the human experience, we will struggle with our attempts to make commitments.

Making real commitments means abandoning a self-centered point of view and finding a broader, more comprehensive perspective.
It means surrendering to the realities of the world as they exist right now. It means integrating yourself into the world through your work, your love, your caring, your participation, your humor, and your presence. It means accepting the humanness of our common experience. In essence for each of us, this means becoming part of the larger picture, going from me to “us” in the biggest sense.

APPENDIX

Managing Your Conflicts and Changing Your Relationships—A Guide for You and Your Partner

We have included this Appendix for anyone who is currently caught in a destructive relationship dynamic, as well as for any reader who is eager to avoid this kind of trap in the future. We realize that the following material, read in its entirety, is repetitive. Please understand that our effort to account for all points of view—passive and active, male and female—made this unavoidable.

SECTION ONE