He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (17 page)

Nonetheless men with passive patterns often blame all women
for their misfortune, saying that the average woman doesn’t appreciate a nice guy. But friends and family are rarely that sympathetic. Get into more than one difficult relationship, and it isn’t long before they start saying things such as, “You like to suffer,” “You like difficult women,” “You don’t want it to be easy.” Your friends may not understand the dynamic that keeps drawing you to the women you choose, but it’s impossible not to notice that you are asking out “all the wrong women.”

Recognizing the countless similarities in the passive-male and the passive-female patterns can be the first step in understanding how passive commitment conflicts reveal themselves.

Timothy is a good example of a man with a passive avoidance pattern who seems to prefer highly problematic partners. However, he tends to see himself as a victim and his role as purely circumstantial. He says:

“Women always talk about how difficult guys are, how insensitive guys are, how uncommitted guys are. But I don’t see it. I think women are the ones with the problem. Take the last woman I went out with, Nicole. She was crazy. I’m sorry, but there is no other way to describe her. I met her at this big party, and I guess we were both drunk. At first when she started talking to me, I thought she was with another guy, but it turned out that she was involved with a guy, but not the one she came with.

“She’s a perfect example. It seems as if every woman I meet is involved with some guy who is brutalizing her, but she keeps going back. That’s what happened with Nicole. She kept complaining about this guy, but she kept going back to him.”

Timothy says that he can’t remember the last time he met a woman who genuinely wanted a committed relationship. His friends point out to him that he only dates models and actresses, who are intent on their careers, and is usually attracted to very young women, sometimes women who are still in their teens.

“It’s true. I like beautiful women, and they are often looking for work in the entertainment industry. But that doesn’t mean that they have to be crazy. My last really important relationship was about a year ago with a woman named Janine. I should have known better—she was very young, just eighteen. But she was very mature for her age. She had a lot of experience, but she was really unclear about what she wanted. She kept me totally off balance
and gave me problems from day one. I could never count on her for anything, even a regular weekend. It was like a nightmare going out with her. I remember once we made a plan to go to the beach for a couple of days, and she showed up with two of her girlfriends. I drove them all down to this cottage I had rented, and then all three of them spent the weekend flirting with other guys on the beach. She was crazy, that’s all.”

Lloyd, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer, also has a passive avoidance problem. However, the women he chooses are nowhere near as colorful as those Tim dates. In fact, often the women Lloyd goes out with seem very appropriate. The main drawback: They almost always indicate their anxieties concerning intimacy and closeness early on in the relationship. Typically this is why the couple eventually breaks up. Lloyd says that he is trying to work out a relationship with his current girlfriend, Elizabeth, a film editor.

“She has this thing about needing her own time and her own space. What that means is that she doesn’t always want to stay at my apartment, and she doesn’t want me to stay at hers. She has lots of restrictions about when we can see each other. We spend a lot of time together, but it’s not sequential time. For example, we may go out on Saturday afternoon and do something. But if we are going out on Saturday night, we can’t just hang out together from, let’s say, four to seven. She needs to be alone for those three hours. It sounds strange, but I know what she means. I need time too. But she is so rigid about it. It makes for a very controlling atmosphere. I always feel as though I am about to be dismissed or something, and it’s not comfortable.”

Lloyd says that Elizabeth is also very reluctant to plan ahead, preferring to keep things spontaneous. This puts him in the position of always waiting for her to make up her mind. He says this “ruins” weekends and every other plan he tries to make.

“On Tuesday I’ll ask whether she wants to go away for the weekend. She says, ‘How can I know what I’m going to want to do now? It’s too early.’ I’ll ask again all through the week, but it’s still too early. Then on Friday night or Saturday morning she’ll decide she wants to go away, and it’s too late. By then we can’t get a car, or we can’t get a reservation—or by the time we do, half a day is
gone. This is very upsetting, and I think it’s destructive. Elizabeth calls it spontaneity; I call it a major pain.”

Lloyd says he is beginning to question everything about this relationship because Elizabeth makes it all so difficult. According to him, she puts up tremendous barriers against intimacy.

“Even talking to her on the phone can be exhausting. I called one night this week to say hi, and she told me she was busy, would I please call back in ten minutes. I did, and she asked if I could make it an hour. I called back in an hour, and she was watching a special on television. Finally I said, ‘Why don’t you just call me when you’re ready?’ She got angry and said I was trying to make her feel guilty.

“She wants a relationship, but she doesn’t want to have to do any of the work. She makes me do it all, and then she gets annoyed because it seems as though I am always pushing for something. I don’t know what to do. She’s really a lovely person, and I care about her, but I’m beginning to feel deprived here. She’s just not giving enough. I have a tough job, and I need some support. It’s not coming from her. Minimally I need to know somebody is happy to be with me. She always acts like I’m bothering her. It’s too much work.”

Although Lloyd claims to be pretty much fed up with Elizabeth’s behavior, he admits that he has been saying the same kinds of things for the two years they have been together. His friends and his family keep asking him why he doesn’t find himself someone who appreciates him. There are other women who find him attractive, why doesn’t he do something about one of them?

A HISTORY OF AVOIDING THE RIGHT PERSON

Always finding the wrong partners means that you are also very skilled at avoiding the right ones. Erika, a forty-one-year-old music teacher, has emotionally pledged herself to unfaithful men and unkind men, men who were profoundly uncommitted and men who were profoundly unavailable, men who slept with her friends and men who wouldn’t sleep with her. Erika is smart, pretty, accomplished, sophisticated, good-natured. Is it possible that she
never, ever meets anyone who is as interested in marriage as she says she is?

Like Erika, Russell—a thirty-seven-year-old photographer—has a long history of partners who either wouldn’t or couldn’t make a commitment to him. He has pursued relationships in which there were insurmountable religious differences, political differences, age differences, and cultural differences. At one time every woman he asked out was about to get engaged to someone else, but a series of unhappy experiences have finally convinced him to stay away from women who are living with or about to marry other men. Russell is good-looking, interesting, articulate, and knowledgeable. Russell is also a nice guy. What is his problem? Why can’t he find someone who will appreciate him for what he is?

How do men and women like Russell and Erika meet so many wrong “significant others”? Is there some secret signal that they are giving off?

We believe that Erika and Russell, and others like them, are usually genuinely unaware of what they are doing. Nonetheless the minute they spot an appropriate, available potential partner, they look the other way. In truth they are more concerned with finding “interesting” partners than they are with finding suitable partners.

RUNNING FROM A “SETTLED” LIFE—THE PASSIVE PATTERN

If you have a passive pattern, then avoidance is written out, loud and clear, in your own romantic history. Chances are that in your twenties, while your peers were settling into long-term stable relationships, you were either trying to get out of one or chasing rainbows. Think about it. Were you honestly looking for commitment and marriage, or were you looking for romance? Were you looking for stability, or were you looking for adventure?

Think also about the potential mates whom you may have discouraged. Looking back, is there any one person who fits that description? Someone about whom you now think, if I’d only known then what I know now, I might have behaved differently? Maybe you never even went out on a single date with this person.
Maybe just hearing him or her described by friends was enough to make you decide against it.

Here’s what you probably thought at the time. You probably rejected meeting or dating these men or women because they looked too settled, too stable, too adult. You decided that you simply weren’t ready for your life to be that settled. What you were telling yourself, even though you didn’t know it, is that you weren’t ready for a real adult commitment to a real adult.

You may also have thought that people like that were too uncomplicated; you may have decided that you were better suited for someone who was more conflicted, someone who could not only understand your conflicts but also provide more of a challenge. Maybe that feeling didn’t feel like fear of commitment at the time, but think about it now.

Paul, thirty-seven, who wrote to us recently to describe his situation, provides a perfect example of someone who frequently withdraws from women who are available. He said:

“I’m a single parent with two little girls. My wife left me a few years ago in order to marry someone else. In the past three years I have been involved with several other women who have commitment problems. But I realize that all of these women, who were clearly chasing after me at the beginning of our relationships, also gave me warning signs that they were not available. One, for example, went out of her way to have friends arrange a date. The first time we went out, she told me that she had a terrible crush on me and thought of me as the ‘perfect man.’ She said she never thought she had a chance with me and that going out with me was her ‘dream come true.’ This dream lasted maybe four torrid weeks before she started breaking dates. One, a date to get together with friends at my house on Thanksgiving Day, she broke at eleven o’clock Thanksgiving morning. She said something had come up. She told me after we split up that she can only really be sexual with someone if she doesn’t like him or if she feels he doesn’t like her.

“But what has occurred to me lately: While every woman with a commitment problem broke up with me, I broke up with every woman who didn’t seem to have a problem. One woman, I remember, for instance, really liked me. She would make all these excuses to come over to my house and do things for me, and while
I was very attracted to her, I didn’t want her there so much. One day she called and said that for my birthday she wanted to come over and cook dinner. She asked me for the keys, saying she would pick up my daughters and then when I came home, she would have given them baths and gotten them ready for bed. All I would have to do is relax.

“I remember walking in the door and being hit with the smell of a nice roast beef cooking. She was in the kitchen. My children had on their pajamas and were playing a game at the kitchen table. The dog was sleeping on a rug in front of a fire. And all I wanted to do was to turn around and walk out. I felt like I was married … like I was coming home from work to the perfect family. My reaction was to want to leave. It’s sad really because she was trying to be nice. I just wasn’t ready for that scene. I felt she was trying to show me what a good wife she would make. It made me very anxious. I split up with her for another commitmentphobic woman shortly after that.”

When men and women with passive conflicts fail to notice, or actually turn down, suitable partners, typically they say that they don’t want to “get stuck” with someone who may not be as “interesting” as they would hope. They don’t want a boring life. No matter how lonely or unfulfilling they find their current life-style, they would prefer to keep searching for someone who fits their criteria, particularly if they are determined either to broaden their paths or to find high adventure. They want to continue to maintain their options, and in that context they don’t want to choose mates who are going to narrow their horizons. In short, they are never quite ready to fit into a settled groove with a settled mate. Whether they realize it or not, that settled groove represents commitment.

COMMITTED TO DREAMS AND FANTASIES

Anyone with commitment conflicts is vulnerable to fantasies. Passive avoiders particularly tend to dream wonderful dreams about long-term commitment. In their minds, and in their imaginations, they are capable of a thousand and one commitments. Given the nature of their elusive partners, and the obstacles that
stand in the way of their relationships, they are rarely called upon to test their ability to hang in for the long haul. Their fantasies typically fall into one of three categories:

Committed to Fantasies About What Is Really Taking Place

Passive avoiders typically are unable to assume a realistic attitude toward either shortcomings and imperfections in their partners or weaknesses in their relationships. While someone who is actively avoiding commitment can take a perfectly good relationship and pick it apart, finding fault with everything a partner may be doing, the passive avoider does exactly the opposite. He or she can take the most ordinary of mortals and elevate this person to a godlike status. Instead of being committed to a real person, the passive avoider is usually incapable of seeing a partner’s reality. The same is true of “the relationship.” Everything that is said, everything that is done, every conflict, every disagreement, every missed meeting, every missed word—it is all aggrandized, blown way out of proportion, until it assumes mythological dimensions.

Much of the passive avoider’s commitment to the relationship revolves around a commitment to somehow change one’s partner. Altering a loved one’s destiny by changing his or her internal attitude is a favorite fantasy.