He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (30 page)

Narcissism and Commitment Conflicts Go Hand in Hand

If you are anxious about commitment, if you are nervous about permanency with any one person, your narcissistic voice, wherever it comes from, gives you the methods and rationalizations to help you stay uncommitted. It’s that narcissistic little voice inside of you that allows you to look at a perfectly suitable person and resist exploring the possibility of a real connection. It can automatically reject some pretty terrific possible people for a wide variety of reasons, most of them superficial and some of them downright silly.

These superficialities are not necessarily about physical characteristics. They can be about where someone went to school or what he does for a living or what she is wearing. Or they can revolve around some personal quirk or image that an individual
may or may not attach to a particular type of education, profession, wardrobe, or life-style.

In other words, in evaluating all romantic situations, instead of applying reasonable judgment skills, those with narcissistic impulses use this to guard the door, making sure that no one who doesn’t fit specific fantasy expectations has a chance.

CLAUSTROPHOBIC COMMITMENT ISSUES

What if you make a commitment to someone, and you end up feeling trapped, as though you can’t get out? What if you end up feeling “tied down,” with all the anxiety and stress this implies? What if another person’s presence, needs, ideas, and vision impinge on your territory, crowd your space, and take away your freedom? What if, what if, what if?

The word
claustrophobic
conjures up all sorts of images of unreasonable limits and small, enclosed spaces. That’s why any environment that limits choices or freedom can be viewed as claustrophobic, as can any situation that ties you down or keeps you stuck in any way. This includes emotional environments as well as physical environments. On some level we all have a visceral sense of what kinds of environments make us feel claustrophobic, and we try to stay away from them. Sometimes we go to people’s houses and we watch the way they live and we think thoughts such as
They seem happy enough, but
I
certainly couldn’t live that way
.

Often what we are responding to is a gut sense that what we are watching would make us feel claustrophobic. We don’t want that much closure in our lives because we know that we would start to feel anxious, uncomfortable, and resentful. But we rarely realize this unless we feel stuck in a relationship that is evoking these feelings.

The idea of commitment can produce a whole range of claustrophobic responses. These include:

The Fear of Losing Freedom

Back in the 1950s young men and women didn’t view marriage as something that would restrict personal freedom. Quite the opposite.
They probably thought they were finally going to be able to act like grown-ups and do things their way without parental supervision. That meant gaining freedom.

For people today it’s a lot different. Today most of us are a lot farther down the road. Typically we know what it is to live alone, make our own decisions, and function as independent adults. We know that there are many joys to being single, and probably nothing is more joyous than the sense of being free to do whatever you want, whenever you want to do it.

When you’re making a commitment to be with another person, you have to start taking another person’s needs into account. You gain something—but you also lose a degree of freedom. But there is also no denying that the anticipation or the idea of the loss of freedom is far worse than any reality. When someone thinks about all the personal freedom that will be lost, typically he or she lumps all of the events that represent freedom into one time frame. They are viewed all together with no spaces in between.

For example, Jay is worried that he will not be free to go skiing with the guys once he is married. In truth Jay goes skiing with the guys no more than once a year and sometimes not even that. Yet the thought of having to take a wife along on all such ski trips makes him feel totally crippled. When he thinks about it, all he can see is the loss of that one weekend a year, and he loses sight of the other 363 days in the year. He also realizes that if he discussed it with his girlfriend, she would probably say, “What’s the big deal? So go skiing without me.”

In this instance it’s also interesting to note that Jay and his girlfriend have taken some wonderful skiing holidays, none of which he would have done if he were still single. He knows this, and yet …

It’s apparent that what Jay fears is loss of the option to do whatever he wants whenever he wants without consulting anyone. This makes him feel trapped, which, in turn, triggers claustrophobic anxiety.

For some people this concern with the loss of freedom crops up after marriage when they think back to all the things they enjoyed doing when they were single. A woman may think back longingly to the happy dinners she shared with single women friends, even though these kinds of festive events may have only taken place a
few times a year. She forgets about lonely weekends and remembers only the glamorous once-in-a-lifetime dates when someone whisked her away to some exotic event.

The Fear of Giving Up Sexual Freedom—What It Means to You

“Suppose I meet somebody else I want to sleep with, what do I do then?”

Some men and women don’t think twice about agreeing to monogamy, but many others experience reactions ranging from mild anxiety to total terror. Some of the people in this group feel that they haven’t had enough experience. Others know they’ve had plenty of experience, but they want still more. A fair number of people who openly acknowledge the depth of their commitment conflicts have told us that they have never been faithful to anyone, and they doubt that it would be possible. Whatever the reason, if you admit to a sexual curiosity that has not been adequately resolved, then you may be a poor candidate for commitment.

But some men and women are not so much afraid of monogamy as they are of losing the option to behave otherwise. They worry that as a partner grows older, desire will wane. Some men have told us that they worry about those one or two times they are presented with situations, or invitations, that may be impossible to resist. For this group the idea of losing sexual freedom seems to be more disconcerting than the reality.

The Fear of Being Bored to Death

What could be more claustrophobic than the feeling of being entombed in a dull marriage? Talk to people about their relationship fears, and many will tell you that they can envision nothing worse for themselves than being trapped in a boring life. A boring life is one that is both ordinary and terrifying because it is a lifeless life, a death before life.

If you are convinced that you are meant to have an exceptional life, then you may well be frightened of finding yourself stuck in a marriage that is both dull and ordinary. That sounds simple enough, but it is not the entire story. Our interviewees have taught us that there are a number of very complex underlying
factors that lead many people to equate commitment with boredom. This fear is most likely to affect your ability to be in a committed relationship if:

• You are accustomed to having chaos in your life, and you don’t really feel “alive” when a relationship begins to get too settled
  

• You saw your parents’ life-style as mundane, stultifying, or repressive; the absence of “life” in their committed relationship makes you fear falling into any pattern that reminds you of them
  

• You have a very dramatic fantasy life, and unless the same kind of soap-style drama exists in your personal life, it feels lackluster
  

• You are extremely bright and need a tremendous amount of stimulation from any partner
  

• You are very emotionally needy, and you expect your romantic relationship to fulfill all those needs
  

• You lack adequate challenge in your professional life and therefore depend upon your personal life to fulfill the majority of your intellectual and emotional needs
  

• You question your own depth and complexity and turn to others to resolve any feelings of inadequacy you may have
  

Whatever the reason, for those with commitment conflicts, the conclusion is always the same: boredom equals death.

The Fear of Physical or Emotional Limitations

Years ago, when we first started interviewing people about commitment, we talked to a man who was in the process of ending a one-year marriage. At the time the reasons he cited for wanting a divorce sounded very strange. Now they make a great deal more sense. He said that he and his wife had lived together for almost five years before they got married. To him these were happy and good years. But when they got married, his wife wanted the relationship to change. She had expectations of marriage that seemed simple enough but that he found terrifying.

You see, marriage to her meant duplicating the kind of routinized
life-style that her parents and their friends had. Once married, she expected the following: As a couple they would eat dinner together every night, using the good china. Every Friday evening they would eat out. Every Saturday they would go out with friends. Every Sunday they would join family.

When they had been living together, mealtimes had all been very spontaneous, very unplanned. Some nights they had dinner together; other nights they didn’t. There were no set rules about when they went out or how often they went out or what they did. This man told us that within six months he felt as though he was entombed and ready to be carted off to the old-folks home. When he described his marriage, he said, “It was claustrophobic.”

People who make a commitment to each other agree that they will make certain accommodations for the good of the relationship. But accommodating another human being can make one feel boxed in and uncomfortable. This can produce a kind of emotional claustrophobia.

For example, immediately after marriage some people fall back on stereotypical role-playing. Women head for the kitchen, men head for the garage. Women do the food shopping, men service the car. Women prepare dinner and gossip on the phone, men watch the ball game and lose potato chips in the couch. This is the American caricature of the way things are supposed to be. But if you don’t personally feel like fulfilling your half of the cartoon script, while your partner is very comfortable with the other part, your situation is going to feel repressive.

In other words any situation that doesn’t allow you to be who you really are can feel stultifying and claustrophobic. This is frightening, and with good reason. Many men and women look around and are unhappy with traditional patterns. Yet they don’t know what else to do. This can produce an underlying wariness of all traditional relationships, which helps explain why we turn to unrealistic and fantasy-based relationships in which we are limited only by our imaginations.

Anything in a relationship that can be perceived as limiting can produce a mild to severe sense of claustrophobia. This in turn can contribute to resentment and a need for distance. Sometimes habits that are really quite innocent may be experienced by one or both partners as confining. The reason? Some activities seem to
imply that if you are a couple, you are seen as one entity, with no boundaries between the two of you. For example:

If we’re a couple, we take vacations together.

If we’re a couple, we go to all parties together.

If we’re a couple, when we go to parties, we stand together.

If we’re a couple, we spend all our weekends in shared activities.

If we’re a couple, we share the same bedroom.

If we’re a couple, we share the same bathroom.

If we’re a couple, we never disagree with each other in public.

If we’re a couple, we go to sleep hugging each other.

If we’re a couple, we present a unified front to the world.

If we’re a couple, we have to have sex
x
number of times per week.

Even people who are loyal, monogamous, and
in love
can feel constricted by the idea of living this way. These men and women want the freedom to act differently in a relationship. Otherwise the limitations of commitment seem overwhelmingly repressive.

The Fear of Losing Your Individuality and Your Sense of Self

We have all seen women who spent their waking lives catering to the needs of others. We are all aware of men who have shortchanged their dreams in order to care for families. About these people we say, “They gave up their lives.” What we mean is that they are defining themselves by the needs of others and in the process they are giving up their own individuality. While we may applaud the amount of love and care these people are capable of showing, we’re not so sure that it’s what we want for ourselves. It’s too confining, too limiting. There is no room to soar, to take care of one’s own creativity, one’s own sense of self. This is a reason why some people, particularly those who may have watched a parent, a relative, or a friend suppress individuality, fear that with commitment comes a loss, a loss of self.

As a society we spend a great deal of time talking about the value we place on individualism. Making your own choices, making your own decisions, making up your own mind—all of these
speak to the fact that we admire people who take care of themselves and think for themselves. We don’t always think about the many small ways in which we express our individualism and our sense of self. But think about it now: Our individuality comes across in how we spend our vacations, where we live, the movies we see, the restaurants we choose, the way we decorate our living space, the way we organize our cabinets, how we spend our money, the time we wake, the time we go to sleep, the dinner parties we give or don’t give, the firmness of our mattress, and how much we spoil the dog or cat.