He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (15 page)

HAS JACK CHANGED?

Jack probably hasn’t changed that much. But times have changed, and women have changed. Stephanie, who is significantly younger than Jack, has a different agenda than the women he used to date. For the first time in his life he is in a relationship in which he isn’t holding most of the power. Stephanie’s commitment issues are so strong that they are effectively canceling out his own. Of course Jack feels able to love for the first time. Knowing that no one is about to tie him down leaves him free to open his heart and feel as enamored and passionate as he wishes. Stephanie will never call him on it because she has more issues with commitment than he does.

Jack’s pattern with Stephanie points up something that we have seen a great many times. Often a man or woman with a pattern of active commitment conflicts will meet someone who has no desire whatsoever to settle down permanently. Then instead of being the partner who is running away from love, he or she takes on the role of passive avoider.

CHAPTER FOUR

Victims and Nice Guys—Passive Commitment Conflicts

“There is something about me that seems to attract married men. I wish I could change it.”

—CLAUDIA, thirty-four

“Every woman I meet is still in love with her old boyfriend. What am I supposed to do about that?”

—JOEL, twenty-nine

“For years all I did was focus on the men I was with and their problems. Every single one had a commitment problem. Then one day I woke up and said
, You know what, I have a problem too.
It all became crystal clear to me that if a woman keeps finding herself involved with men who are running away from commitment, then she is running away too.”

—CORETTA, thirty-nine

Some people look as though they are able to commit. In fact, they may even appear obsessed with getting a commitment. Overwhelmingly focused on love and loving, they claim to feel no fear and maintain that they are longing for a permanent relationship. But even though they are capable of falling head over heels in love and of swearing undying devotion, they do so with people who are ultimately unable or unwilling to reciprocate.

If you are acting out your commitment conflicts in a passive fashion, it’s true that you may not be running away from a permanent
relationship. In all likelihood you are instead pursuing someone else who is. Passive avoiders are rarely in relationships in which their love is returned in kind. That’s what it means to have passive commitment conflicts.

How do you know if you are passively avoiding commitment? The best way to tell is by looking at the people to whom you are attracted. Do they want commitments? Do they share your feelings? Are they appropriate? Are they available? Or are they usually dancing off in the opposite direction? Let’s face it, it’s very “safe” to say you want permanency if everyone you get involved with is incapable of responding in kind.

Because they are often so emotionally overwrought trying to “work out” unworkable love situations, men and women with passive commitment issues are rarely in touch with their own fears. Instead their fears remain hidden, even from themselves.

Allison, a thirty-six-year-old writer, is one such person. At the moment Allison’s life is fairly well taken up by her sessions with her therapist and the codependency meetings that she recently started to attend in the Los Angeles area. Allison, who has a fourteen-year-old son, is trying to recover from the depression caused by the breakup of her relationship with Josh, thirty-four, also a writer. As Allison puts it:

“Josh was the classic ‘commitmentphobic’ He had lived with a couple of women before he met me, but he had never been able to make a commitment. On his first date he told me all about himself—how he had never been faithful and how he had never been able to stay in one place for very long. I guess I knew it all up front, but I didn’t really pay attention to much of it.

“For one thing Josh had a drinking problem that he had worked through, and I thought this meant that he would be able to work other things out as well. Then the sex between us was so good … that was the thing about him—he always wanted to make love—and he acted like he was in love with me. He told me I was beautiful and that we would grow old together; he said we would shock people by making love in the senior center.

“Josh is very beautiful. He’s tall and thin with elegant hands and a great neck. I always loved his clothes—the way he wore them. I was crazy about him—I am still crazy about him, and I can’t seem to forget about him, even though I know he is poison.
Even so I have all these daydreams that he is sitting in my living room and we’re still together.”

Allison and Josh met in early May; by Memorial Day he was talking about marriage. When July came around, Allison’s son went off to camp, and Allison, even though it upset her work schedule, moved into the apartment Josh was subletting near the water. Allison saw this as a perfect opportunity to solidify the relationship. Allison says:

“He became very dependent on me. He was working on a new script, and we sort of revolved our schedule around his work. I tried to be a writer’s perfect wife—I did all the shopping and cleaning and cooking—so he could have the time to concentrate and finish. It was a mistake, and I don’t think he appreciated it. In fact I think he began to resent it, although I didn’t ‘get it’ at the time. He also had all these quirky rules about his things—what could be moved, what couldn’t. Even though he seemed dependent, he didn’t always seem happy to have me there. I probably should have called him on it, but I was afraid.”

By the end of the summer, when Allison had to move back into her own apartment, things were no longer as idyllic. When they would see each other, Josh was as romantic and passionate as always, but he was different. Allison believed that there were realistic reasons for this.

“Because my son was in my apartment, Josh could only sleep over on weekends. So when we started to have sex less frequently, it seemed normal within the context of everything else that was going on. He was also slightly withdrawn. But he said he always got this way when he had to finish a script and that I should just ignore him. Easier said than done of course. Then he started forgetting to call, and he would always be late. One day we had a date, and he didn’t show up. I got hysterical, and I refused to see him for a couple of weeks. Then when I did, he had bought me a book of poetry and was very contrite, and we patched things up again.

“In the meantime, you have to understand, this relationship took up my life. I was either waiting for him to call, waiting for him to arrive, or waiting for him to relieve my anxiety. When we were together, though, he was the same as always. He would talk to me for hours at a time about what he was working on, about his
problems, about his life, about his parents, about his feelings. It went on and on.”

Allison says she concentrated a great deal of effort in trying to prove to Josh what a positive force she was in his life. But her own work got neglected because she was often too anxious to concentrate. He had told her that he was having such a hard time working that he needed to unplug his phone. This meant that Allison could no longer call him. Also the sex had changed. He would still sleep over at Allison’s apartment, but they wouldn’t have sex. She began to worry that perhaps the two-year age difference was affecting her desirability.

“I really began to get crazy that I had wrinkles or sags, and I started working out every day. It was all I could think of. When Josh was finally finished with his script, he said he was exhausted. I had been reading and commenting on the script all along, so I offered to copyedit it. It was the week before Christmas. I took the script to work on, and when I was finished, I tried to call Josh. There was no answer. There was no answer for three days. Once again I got hysterical.

“It turns out that, for this whole time, he had been going out with another woman. She lived right next door. I had actually seen the two of them together in the summer. I just didn’t put two and two together. Then he didn’t show up on Christmas Eve, and when he came over on Christmas Day to bring me a present, I exploded. That’s when it all came to a head, and he told me about this other woman. Fortunately my son was at his father’s, because I was a basket case. I cried and cried and cried. So did Josh. He apologized, he promised it would all change, he promised he would work his problems out, and he promised we would be together.

“He goes to group, and it turns out that he had discussed everything that was going on, and they were very hard on him. They had already pointed out how manipulative and unfair he had been. There was nothing I could say that he didn’t already know.

“To make a long story short, he promised he would stop seeing the other woman, but he never did. I didn’t believe that he could lie to me like that, but he did. We went through another couple of months of getting together and getting apart, and finally we both said enough is enough. It’s now June, and I can’t seem to resolve
my feelings. He wants to be friends, but I can’t do it. He and the other woman have found an apartment together, and it’s killing me. I can’t figure out what happened. We ran into each other one day, and we both started to hyperventilate. I know he still has feelings for me. I can’t believe this has happened. The truth is that as angry as I am at him, I would take him back in a minute. I just miss him so much.”

When we first heard this story, we were immediately sympathetic to Allison. She was so well intentioned in this relationship, and she tried so hard to make Josh happy, it’s natural to want to run to her defense. Josh is a creep, no two ways about it. But just because Josh is a creep doesn’t mean that Allison doesn’t have a problem. Consider all the things she knew about him from the very first—his attitude toward fidelity, his attitude toward permanency of any kind, his attitude toward romantic commitment. Yet Allison chose to continue without being appropriately cautious and self-protective. Why would she do this? As a single parent the last thing she needs in her life is more instability.

Why did she move into his apartment so early in the relationship? Why did she expose herself to the potential for this kind of turmoil? Once he started to show signs of withdrawing, placing barriers in her path, why didn’t she notice? Why is she, even now, prepared to “take him back” if he asks? Why did she have so few appropriate reactions and so many wrong ones?

THE WRONG RESPONSE

Passive avoidance reveals itself in a series of inappropriate responses. Where those who are actively avoiding commitment are busily engaged in running away and setting limits on their love, passive avoiders seem to do everything they can to bond themselves to their love objects. But consider the people they choose to focus their feelings on. No wonder they have no sense of becoming “trapped” in a permanent union.

Greg, a thirty-four-year-old golf pro, describes one of his more painful relationship experiences:

“No matter how much I recognized her problems, no matter how twisted the situation got, no matter how clear I was about the
potential downside, I was incapable of extricating myself. I felt as though we were somehow predestined to be together. I felt that I had no choice but to go through the experience—to play it out. To me there was no way around it. And nothing anyone said or did could help me.”

The affair Greg is talking about is one he recently had with Ava, his employer’s wife. Ava is eight years older than Greg, significantly wealthier, and amazingly cynical about her extramarital romances. When Greg met her and she started flirting with him, every ounce of good sense he had told him to stay away. Instead he catapulted toward her, falling madly in love, in the process jeopardizing not only his emotional well-being but also his job. This type of behavior is typical of Greg, who has a history of getting involved with inappropriate partners. It is his way of avoiding commitment.

If, like Greg, you are passively avoiding commitment, here are some of the ways in which your responses are guaranteeing you a safe way to avoid a committed relationship:

•
You are drawn to inappropriate or unavailable partners
.

This is the most efficient way of avoiding commitment. When someone with passive commitment issues falls in love, it is almost always with someone who is emotionally, physically, or circumstantially unavailable. Having found this person, who typically has even more serious problems with commitment, the passive avoider is free to go all out in an attempt to win an unattainable prize.

•
You make inappropriate commitments and are too quickly won over
.

It’s certainly normal to be flattered by the interest of someone new. But men and women with passive commitment conflicts are more than just flattered. They can have an all-encompassing romantic response to someone they barely know. It’s important to note here that this response is not only sexual—it is also profoundly emotional. Describing their reactions, passive avoiders typically use words such as
soul mate, karma
, or
fate
. These intense
responses can keep someone tied up in romantic fantasies for an extraordinarily long period of time.