He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (27 page)
Authors: Steven Carter
Tags: #Self-Help, #General
As Far As Commitment Is Concerned, Do You Have an Active or a Passive Behavior Pattern?
Everyone has the capacity to act out in both patterns, depending on the partner and the circumstances. However, each of us is usually more comfortable with one pattern than the other. For example:
John has a long history actively running after—and then running away from—dozens of women. However, in his head he carries a memory of an equally commitmentphobic woman who rejected him.
Mary is usually found playing the passive role in commitmentphobic relationships with an unavailable man. However, she has rejected any number of available men, who view
her
as an elusive femme fatale.
As you answer the following questions, keep in mind that women are often still more comfortable with a passive pattern and men with an active one. Think about your history in relationships. Which pattern seems most familiar to you?
Are you the active partner?
Do you have a history of pursuing—or becoming wildly enthusiastic about—new partners whom you later reject?
Are you consciously aware that you are ambivalent or afraid of commitment?
Are you convinced that somewhere there is a “perfect” person who will help you overcome that fear?
Do you often feel a need to create distance in your relationships?
Are you aware of having caused pain to any of your past loves because of your unwillingness to commit?
As your relationships become more intense and more intimate, do you often begin to find more faults and reasons why you shouldn’t make a commitment?
In your relationships are you the one who sets most of the rules including how often you will see each other?
Do expectations and demands make you feel trapped and resentful?
Once a relationship’s initial stage is over, are you conscious of setting things up so that your partner will have fewer expectations?
When a relationship has ended, do you allow almost no time to elapse before finding a new partner?
Do the demands of a relationship make you feel that someone is encroaching on your space?
Active avoiders will answer yes to many, if not most, of the above questions. Passive avoiders, on the other hand, will answer yes to many, if not most of the following questions.
Are you the passive partner?
Do you have a history of getting involved with partners who have serious, obvious commitment problems?
Do you spend a great deal of time fantasizing about relationships, often about past partners or unavailable partners?
Have you often been attracted or drawn to people who were obviously inappropriate or unavailable?
Are you often more committed to the potential of a relationship than you are to a person?
Do you feel more powerfully connected to partners when they are miles away, or involved elsewhere, than you do when they are sitting next to you?
Are you so afraid of being stuck in a boring, ordinary relationship that you gravitate toward partners who appear to be more exciting, even though their life-styles are less stable?
Are you turned on by the challenge of altering the behavior of a difficult partner?
When relationships end, do you tend to get stuck in the grieving process for an inordinate amount of time?
Are you waiting for something magical to happen to resolve your romantic life?
Do you resist taking the necessary steps to meeting appropriate, available partners?
If someone doesn’t knock down your defenses in a first meeting, do you resist letting a connection develop over time?
In many of your relationships was it always clear on some very basic level that it could never last?
Do You Remember What Happened in Your Past Relationships?
You can’t learn from the past if you can’t remember what happened. So let’s examine the most important romantic relationships and/or romantic feelings (crushes, unfulfilled fantasies) in your past. Try to do this in descending order of importance, starting with the past loves who are most significant.
Don’t examine your current relationship until you’ve finished with the past
.
Try to remember back to the very beginning of each of these important relationships and answer the following questions about each of the people on your list, one at a time. Figure that each important person deserves several sheets of paper. As we said before, take your time. Don’t try to do everybody at once.
What were your first reactions to this person?
How do you think this person first reacted to you?
If you were not all that attracted initially, do you remember what changed your mind?
At the beginning were you the pursuer or the pursued?
Was this person appropriate for you or inappropriate? And why?
Was this person available for a commitment or unavailable? Why?
Looking at this relationship from the other person’s point of view, were you an appropriate choice? Why? Why not?
Were you available for a commitment? If not, why not?
How did your feelings for this person change over the course of the relationship?
What did you feel at the beginning?
What did you feel in the middle of the relationship?
What did you feel at the end of the relationship?
What did you feel immediately after the relationship was over?
What did you feel later, after some time had elapsed?
For each stage, if your feelings changed,
why
did they change?Do you remember any specific turning points? What were they?
How do you think this person’s feelings for you changed over the course of the relationship? Why do you think they changed?
At the beginning of this relationship, did you have any reservations? What were they? Did any of them come back to haunt you?
List all of the ways in which this person may have tried to put distance into the relationship. Were you emotionally shut out? Were there unreasonable boundaries? Were you excluded from important parts of his or her life?
List all of the ways in which you may have introduced distance or boundaries into the relationship.
How well did you really know this person? What didn’t you know about this person?
How well did this person know you? What didn’t this person know about you?
Was this person’s behavior at the beginning, middle, and end of the relationship consistent with what you know about him or her? How was it different?
What did you want from this relationship at all the different stages?
At the beginning?
In the middle?
At the end?
If you wanted different things at different stages, what changed your mind?
How honest were you with this person? Specifically, what feelings and what facts, if any, did you conceal?
At the beginning?
In the middle?
At the end?
How honest do you think this person was with you? What feelings or facts do you think might have been concealed?
At the beginning?
In the middle?
At the end?
In what ways might you have been unfair in this relationship?
In what ways might your partner have been unfair?
At any stage of the relationship were you critical and faultfinding of your partner? At which stage(s)?
At any stage of the relationship, was your partner critical and faultfinding of you? At which stage(s)?
What were your fantasies about this relationship? How did they change as the relationship evolved?
What are your fantasies, if any, about this relationship now?
Was there ever a time when this relationship felt solid, even, and easy? How long did that last? What precipitated the change?
How soon after starting this relationship did you know your partner’s relationship history? Did any of that matter to you?
Did this partner ever warn you about his or her behavior in relationships?
Did either you or this partner ever discuss ambivalence or fears about commitment?
If this person discussed such conflicts, did you believe what you heard?
If you discussed such conflicts, do you think your partner believed what he or she heard?
On some level did you always know that this relationship couldn’t work out unless there were some major changes in behavior or attitude?
What made you believe that such a change was possible?
In this relationship were you hooked on the potential as much, if not more, than you were on the actual relationship?
How would you compare this relationship as it really existed with the relationship as you believed it could be if only you could actualize its potential?
How did this relationship end? Did you end it? Did the other person end it?
What was the major issue involved in the breakup?
If commitment was the major issue, what other problems might the two of you have had if a commitment had been made?
Do you think you were self-protective in this relationship?
Do you think your partner was self-protective in this relationship?
Why was this relationship important to you?
Make a list of the ways in which you think you should have been more self-protective in this relationship.
After you’ve finished with your past, take the same quiz about your current partner, if any, and answer all applicable questions. When you’re done, try the following exercise:
Make a list of the qualities and characteristics that you consider most important in a partner.
Now make a list of the primary characteristics of each of your most important partners.
How do these two lists compare? What kind of conclusions can you draw from the lack of agreement?
How Rapidly Do You Make Commitments in Nonromantic Areas?
Commitment isn’t just about romance, it’s about life. If you are hypersensitive to commitment, your struggle is going to emerge in more than one area. There are people so commitmentphobic that all the cells in the their bodies scream out,
Don’t tie me down!
Reluctant to do anything they can’t undo, worried about making the wrong choice or limiting their options, they can never make choices in any areas of their lives.
This level of anxiety is paralyzing. If every choice, every small commitment—because it limits options—feels like a small death, it’s impossible to live a full life.
In this section we’d like to take a closer look at the struggle to
maintain options and remain uncommitted in a world full of commitment. Does any of this sound like you? How about the people you’ve been in love with?
How Elusive Are You?
Do people ever complain that they can’t find you when they need you? Are you impossible to pin down? Are you purposely vague and elusive about your plans? Can the people in your life always count on you—do they know that you’re always there should they need you—or do you keep them so off balance that they are afraid to ask too much of you?
People with commitment conflicts often work very hard to keep family and friends at a distance. They don’t like being that accessible. At a family gathering or party they don’t stay in one place too long and prefer to move around. They don’t give many people access to their inner world. Even with their closest friends they often don’t allow conversations about themselves to become too deep and are experts at changing the subject before anyone gets too close to what they are truly feeling. If they do allow someone to get a glimpse of what they are really feeling, they are inclined to balance the intensity by drawing back or vanishing. Often they don’t want to commit themselves to the present because they are saving themselves for something better. Even they are not sure what that something is.
