He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (3 page)

A commitment to another person, almost by definition, is going to necessitate compromise and limit your sense of freedom. This may engender powerful feelings of anger, anxiety, and resentment. Fail to commit and there are other possible emotional costs—loneliness, a sense of incompleteness, and alienation. It’s a catch-22 that we must all face.

For years now we’ve all heard about the male struggle with commitment. “The reluctant groom” is a well-known figure in our society. But are there women who are equally scared? In one word: Yes.

Some women have no difficulty acknowledging both their conflicts and their fears. They say that they worry about getting stuck playing out a traditional role in a traditional household. They say that the little house with a picket fence is their
Nightmare on Elm Street
.

But what about the woman who says that’s exactly what she
wants but she can’t find it? She finds it difficult to believe that she could be running away from long-term love. Typically when she looks at her behavior in relationships, she is most conscious of the amount of love, care, and, yes, commitment that she has showered on the men in her life. Her attitude: Bring on the husbands who come home at the same time every night, bring on the babies, bring on the barbecues and the joint checking accounts.

You tell a woman like this that she is conflicted about commitment and she answers, No way, not me! She thinks we should talk to the men in her life. She thinks they are the ones with problems. We don’t disagree with her, but we think she is also conflicted. We think the way her conflicts play out may be directly connected to why she isn’t getting the loving relationship she wants. In order to protect herself, a woman such as this needs to understand more about her partner’s behavior, but she also needs to understand more about herself.

It wasn’t that long ago that both men and women made commitments for better or worse. It was a societal expectation, and most people conformed. The exceptions were considered oddities or oddballs, spinsters or misfits, mama’s boys, or sad sacks. That was simply the way it was.

It was thought that men needed to get married in order to have regular sex, someone to cook their meals, wash their dishes, and care for their children. Women, on the other hand, needed fathers for their children, protection from the world, and breadwinners for the family unit. Of course both sexes wanted love and companionship, but the way things were set up, mates were essential in order to provide certain specific supports. No one believed any man could cook, care for a baby, or do the laundry adequately. And certainly no one believed that women could be genuinely effective in the marketplace.

Marriage involved more than a meeting of the hearts: it was a very practical solution to the problems of living. Then things started to change, and along with these changes came drastic shifts in the marital equation.

In the 1960s several things happened to spur the change in attitudes: The birth control pill went on the market and birth control became legal and available throughout the country. Then,
in 1966, Masters and Johnson published
Human Sexual Response
, and the sexual revolution went into full swing.

As the sexual revolution progressed, there were immediate effects on the way people viewed commitment. Probably most significant was that one no longer had to be in a committed relationship to have regular sex. At first, perhaps, this message registered most profoundly with men, many of whom felt that they no longer had to say “I do” in order to convince women to share their beds. It wasn’t long thereafter before women started complaining of boyfriends who had commitment “problems.” It seemed suddenly as though there was an epidemic of men who were avoiding the old marital agreement. We all heard stories of men who needed time, needed space, weren’t sure, hadn’t dated enough, hadn’t been with enough women, or had been with too many of the wrong women. In the meantime men were also learning to be a lot more domestically self-sufficient.

By the mid-1970s we were beginning to see the effects of the feminist movement. Women began to find their power in the workplace, and more and more young women could expect to be economically self-sufficient. Other attitudes have changed as well. Although single motherhood is often an economic hardship, it is no longer the social stigma it once was. For many women it has become a viable option. And let’s not forget those women who are questioning whether or not motherhood will play any role at all in their lives. In short the rules have changed for women and men.

Today we are seeing the first generation of women who have grown up after the women’s movement. And every day we are hearing more and more stories of women who are resisting traditional commitments—women who no longer feel that they need husbands in order to have meaningful lives.

Wasn’t anyone afraid of commitment before the sexual revolution? Or earlier than that, back in grandma’s day? Of course they were. The fear of commitment is a natural human response. However, when you weigh the anxiety of “getting stuck” in a marriage against what it meant to be single at that time—social stigma, celibacy or highly erratic sexuality, economic insecurity—it’s quickly apparent that the fear of being single was frequently greater than the fear of getting stuck. Right now there are simply more choices,
particularly for women, and fewer reasons why someone should be afraid of being single.

Obviously this is an oversimplification of our history. Everyone has unique circumstances and different economic realities. However, the bottom line is that, fear or no fear, the need to commit and stay committed has changed. And for most of us that spells conflict.

FOR THE WOMAN READER

Both men and women have conflicts. Women, however, have special and complex consequences and realities that are gender specific. This can’t help but put them at a disadvantage.

Men who are anxious about commitment often reassure themselves with the thought that their anxieties will eventually go away, and that even if this doesn’t happen until they are in their mid-forties or later, they can still get married and start a family. Women, forced to deal with the realities of their biological clocks, are rarely able to be so sanguine about future solutions. To complicate matters, few consider it entirely acceptable for women to pursue men with the kind of freedom that men enjoy when they are interested in finding romantic partners. If she wants a relationship, even the most liberated woman may find herself feeling that she has few options other than “waiting” patiently for Mr. Right.

Those women who receive parental pressure to hurry up, get married, and produce grandchildren are often caught in an even more complicated dilemma; the inability to “perform” adequately in this area may make them feel as though they have failed in their filial duty. For women particularly, the pressure to get married combined with the anxiety that such matters are not totally within their control—they still have to wait for a man to propose—is often overwhelming. It may cause them to bury their anxieties about commitment in a way that is particularly self-destructive.

What this means is that women who don’t explore their own commitment issues are at a disadvantage: They are unaware of the ways in which hidden conflicts influence and determine their choices. Consequently they often find themselves in destructive
relationships, passively acting out their anxieties by becoming involved with men who are inappropriate or emotionally unavailable.

ACTING OUT THE COMMITMENT DILEMMA

Everyone who has a conflict between freedom and commitment—and fails to understand how that conflict reveals itself in his or her life—runs the risk of sabotaging every single romantic relationship. If you don’t understand what you feel or how those feelings are affecting your behavior, you will probably find yourself acting out your ambivalence.

This means that you will almost certainly find yourself in a series of relationships that never seem to work out, relationships in which either you or your partners are running away from love.

Committed relationships are hard. It’s hard to find one and it takes a lot of work to keep one. It’s even harder when you don’t understand how your commitment issues may be causing you to choose partners and situations that are doomed to failure. Everywhere we go, we hear stories about unresolved commitment conflicts. Typically these stories are about men and women who say they want a committed relationship, but whose behavior patterns say something entirely different. Tom, a thirty-one-year-old sales rep, is one such person.

For years everyone has told Tom that he has a problem. His girlfriends, his parents, and his friends all say that he is afraid of commitment. Tom says he can understand why they come to this conclusion, but from his perspective that’s not the way it feels. His history spells out his conflicts.

At twenty-four Tom was weeks away from announcing his engagement to Angelica, a woman he had been dating for two years. Smart, kind, loving, and crazy about him, she thought they were building a future together, but suddenly Tom started backing off, putting off the engagement, and talking about needing time.

Tom says Angelica tried very hard to understand what he was going through, but even
he
couldn’t figure out what he was feeling. At his suggestion they took a month’s vacation from each other. Within that month he met and fell head over heels in love
with Reba, a thirty-two-year-old divorced mother. At first Reba was less enthusiastic; she was very attracted to Tom, but she thought he was too young, and too poor to help provide the security she wanted to create for herself and her two children.

Their relationship continued for three years, during which time Tom couldn’t stop thinking, or talking, about Reba—her needs, her kids’ needs, her demands. He especially delighted in playing house with her and acting as substitute father to her children. His efforts paid off. Convinced that the two of them could provide a good environment for the children, Reba started looking for a larger apartment in a neighborhood that was more convenient for Tom’s work.

No sooner had she found one than Tom began having second thoughts. After all, by now Reba was thirty-five, her children were approaching adolescence, and she wanted to have another baby before it was too late. Suddenly for Tom everything paled. He looked at Reba and where once he had seen only ivory skin, he now saw varicose veins. Where once he had seen adorable children, he now saw the prospect of rebellious teenagers and college tuition. Where once he looked forward to the comforts of being with Reba—home-cooked meals, adult conversation, cozy intimacy—now he felt bored, constrained, and old before his time. “Do I really need this?” he asked his friends.

But Tom was very conflicted about what he wanted. He was attached to Reba, he was sexually bonded to Reba, and he was emotionally dependent on Reba. He couldn’t leave overnight. It took close to two years before Tom and Reba finally split up permanently—two difficult, painful years. When Tom articulated his confusion, Reba felt betrayed, abandoned, and angry, not only for herself but also for her children, who had become very attached to Tom.

He, understandably, felt guilty and overwhelmed; he spent most of his time trying to figure out what he was feeling and why he was feeling it. For two years, while the relationship unraveled, Reba spent much of her time trying to figure out what she could do to get things back on an even keel. This setup caused a lot of backing-and-forthing. Tom and Reba split up, they reconciled, they split up, they reconciled. Finally the pain was too great. Reba said enough is enough, and this time when Tom felt the old surges
of jealousy coming over him at the idea of her dating someone else, he restrained himself from calling.

After Reba, Tom was much more careful. He vowed he wasn’t going to jump into anything. So he developed his male friendships, cultivated a few women friends, and, very carefully, started to date again. People introduced him to a great many women, but he didn’t like any of them. When he had been with Reba, he would look at some of these very same women with complete lust, but now that he was no longer with her, they seemed flighty and immature, wrapped up in their careers and their shopping. They didn’t seem real or sufficiently down to earth. Tom wanted to settle down with the right woman—if only he could meet the right woman; if only he could find someone like himself, someone who wanted what he wanted. Someone intelligent, who could understand his conflicts.

That’s when Tom met Susan. At twenty-seven Susan’s romantic résumé included one serious crush and two serious relationships. The crush happened when she was in college. It was directed toward an English instructor in the process of divorcing his wife. For the most part the relationship between Susan and her instructor consisted of aborted meetings, furtive phone calls, and smoldering looks during class. Although there was infrequent physical contact between them, she thought of little else. When the instructor and his wife reconciled, it took her months to recover from her sense of rejection. The entire episode occupied nearly two years. While her friends were out dating, she was at home daydreaming about her married friend and reading all the books that he had ever mentioned.

Susan didn’t date again until after graduation, when she met and got engaged to a successful young businessman. The match made both sets of parents ecstatic. It made Susan anxious. After the initial thrill of getting engaged wore off, she started having second thoughts. She didn’t fancy leading the life of a young matron. She wanted time to develop her own career, and she began to wonder whether she had dated enough. At one time she believed she loved her fiancé, but as the wedding date neared, she got more and more depressed, and she started having nightmares that she knew were directly related to what she was feeling. She confided in her friends, but they all assured her that she would
get over these “jitters,” and that even if she didn’t, she was so lucky to have met such a terrific guy.

One night, two weeks before the wedding, as she was sitting in a restaurant with her fiancé and both sets of parents, planning the final wedding details, her anxiety became so intense that she thought she was going crazy. She had a hard time breathing and she wanted to scream. She felt like someone in a film script, and she imagined herself running off with the waiter. At that moment every man in the room looked more attractive, more interesting, and more desirable than the one she was engaged to marry.