He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (31 page)

When you’re single, these are all things you decide for yourself. When you’re part of a couple, you’ve got to make some adjustments in these areas, not to mention even more complicated matters, such as child rearing and which holidays to spend with which relatives. You have to learn to make shared decisions. Yet for some people
compromise triggers panic
.

It’s hard to believe that choosing a restaurant or buying new towels is enough to throw a relationship into crisis. It’s hard to believe that deciding on a movie, going on vacation, or going grocery shopping is enough to split up a marriage. But plenty of people with commitment conflicts will admit, though somewhat shamefully, that seemingly insignificant events like these have triggered break-ups.

Relationships require compromise. Everybody knows that. No two people will ever be in agreement all of the time on all of the issues that affect them as a couple. Part of being in a relationship is learning to work through these conflicts.

Making compromises means giving up a certain degree of individuality, and we already know how many of us feel about that. Going from “me” to “us” is a tremendous adjustment for anyone, especially if you’ve been a “me” for a long time. If you’re sensitive about your physical and emotional space, the transition can create an almost immediate feeling of being trapped. Sometimes what you might hate is simply that you are being trapped into a role that feels foreign and uncomfortable.

The Fear of Giving Up Control

One of the reasons that claustrophobic environments are so anxiety provoking is because they make us feel powerless. If you are stuck in a meeting in a room that feels stuffy and tight, you open a window. The act of opening that window gives you a sense that you have the power to control your environment and thus alleviate the discomfort.

Even if we don’t give it much thought, we all know that we feel more comfortable, more at ease, in any environment we control. If we have power, we feel better. It’s that simple. But in a relationship somebody else is going to have some power over your life. That’s scary. And it’s a major reason why control looms so large in the minds of those with commitment anxiety.

Do you have strong feelings about having anyone control your life? Do you come from a family in which one parent dominated the other? Did your parents try to control you? Do you have a controlling sibling? Do you hate being with someone who tells you what to do?

Some of us are so sensitive to control issues that we try to dominate every element of our relationships. Others, equally sensitive, simply walk away from anyone who is perceived as trying to establish control.

Fear of being controlled is a major commitment fear. Women often fear that men will try to dominate what they think, what they feel, and what they do in a very direct fashion. Men sometimes state that women try to manipulate them to gain control. Certainly we have all witnessed couples who seem to be in an ongoing battle for control. They tell each other how to drive, how to dress, how to wash dishes, how to walk, how to sleep—in short how to live. This isn’t a pleasant sight, and many men and women worry about duplicating that type of relationship in their own lives. And with good reason.

It’s important to point out that staying in control isn’t always accomplished by bossiness. Some people’s moods and emotions are so strong that they seem almost to reach out and grab control of another’s psyche. Some examples:

• A thirty-four-year-old man says that he realizes that his parents, especially his mother, made him feel guilty. His mother,
who managed to hold down a full-time job while still taking care of the household chores, repeatedly reminded him of how hard she worked. He knows that women often make him feel guilty. He hates that feeling and says he doesn’t want it in his adult life.

• A thirty-eight-year-old woman told us that her husband’s moods when he loses at tennis control everybody in the house. She said, “When he comes home happy, we’re all happy. But when he loses and comes back miserable, it is as though this giant cloud looms over all of us. I feel as though all I want to do is run away. It’s totally oppressive.”

Money is another way in which someone can assume or lose control. Betty, forty-one, says that she was first married at nineteen to a man who was considerably older and wealthier than she was. Not having her own money made her feel totally controlled. When she got a divorce, she consciously decided that she would never again be involved with anyone who had more money than she did. She says, “So for the next ten years every man I went out with was a totally inappropriate, poverty-stricken deadbeat. It was a clear reaction to my marriage, but I didn’t figure it out until I went into therapy.”

Claustrophobic reactions to the compromises and limitations of commitment are disconcerting at best. When they are combined with some of the universal fears we all carry with us, they can be devastating.

UNIVERSAL HUMAN COMMITMENT ISSUES

As members of the human race, sometimes we are all too predictable in our responses to certain situations. Commitment carries with it part of the human imperative—to produce and raise children, thus ensuring the continuance of our kind. But it also carries with it some anxieties that we all share. For example:

The Fear of Giving Up the Dream

Walking alongside each of us is a dream of the ideal partner, the soul mate, the karmic connection. This is the partner we are waiting
for; this is the partner we are looking for. Sure, this person’s description changes from time to time depending upon what is happening in life at that moment. Sometimes this partner is supportive, understanding, and sensitive. Other times this partner provides pure sexual excitement. This partner does everything we need whenever we need it.

For some of us this partner is someone we have never met. For others it is someone we’ve met who has never expressed any interest in being with us. For still others it is someone with whom we’ve had a relationship, often one in which we’ve been rejected.

Whoever this partner is, in our dreams he or she is the Right One. And we worry that if we settle down with someone else, we won’t be free if Mr. or Ms. Right shows up. Hanging on to this dream is a way of avoiding commitment in all areas of your life. Let’s take a look at how this works:

Maddie, thirty-nine, is very attractive, very smart, very accomplished, very nice, and very lonely. Years of her life have been spent waiting for one man or another to realize that they were meant to be together. Her last relationship was with an admittedly commitmentphobic man. Currently Maddie is waiting patiently for her “beloved” to come to his senses and return to her waiting arms. Maddie lives on her reconciliation fantasies. These are her dreams.

Roger, thirty-three, is convinced that the woman who works in a boutique on his block is the woman of his dreams. He has found out that she is living with someone else, so he is biding his time. He walks into her store every now and then to buy something. He’s trying to position himself so that when her relationship breaks up, he will be waiting. In the meantime he thinks about her a lot.

Both Maddie and Roger are invested in dreams. Neither of them ever want to admit that their fantasies won’t work out. To give them up has more significance than simply turning their backs on particular relationship choices. In their heads, giving up these dreams is akin to giving up God. Their emotions have transcended the category of mere human male/female and have gone into the realm of the spiritual. They can’t give up their belief in the positive outcome of their romantic fantasies without questioning the power of faith and belief.

Some people take this to extremes. They attempt to make deals with God; they honestly tell themselves that if they are good enough, they will be rewarded with human, not divine, love. They become convinced that if they are understanding enough, or loving enough, or wise enough, heaven will send them their destined mate. These men and women, well intentioned though they may be, need to find a more constructive outlet for their spiritual energies and charitable concerns. They need to acknowledge that there are more noble and heaven-sent causes than some man or woman who isn’t returning affections or phone calls.

All of this is a way of avoiding a commitment to a real life, real people, and real faith. Part of growing up is giving up this dream.

The Fear of Growing Up and Becoming a Real Adult

Getting married, having children, raising a family—these are the classic signposts of commitment in our culture. Commitment is about love, but it is also about responsibility. It’s about compromise. It’s about sacrifice. It’s about work. In short, commitment is about growing up.

Growing up isn’t easy for anyone. It means relinquishing hopes and fantasies. It means a lot more work and a lot less play. It means facing reality. For some of us that’s way too much to ask. We want love in our lives, but we’re not ready to grow up yet. This shows itself in our inability to form and maintain committed relationships.

Some of us are part of a generation that was told we had it too easy. That we are spoiled, selfish, and self-focused. It is true that many in this generation did not have the hardship of war or economic depression that “forced” previous generations into adulthood. But we may not be convinced that this kind of accelerated development is a good thing. Who needs that much responsibility? Why can’t we have love without the commitment? Why can’t we just have fun?

If our society is going to continue, some of us are going to have to grow up and take on adult responsibilities. But why do there seem to be fewer and fewer volunteers? Perhaps it’s because of the hardship so many of us
have
already endured—hardship that is not always acknowledged.

Sometimes our hardship came in the form of a dysfunctional household. This kind of trauma, like most childhood trauma, arrested our development, as opposed to accelerating it. Instead of having the tools and supports to develop into adults, we were left to develop into a nation of “adult children.”

Adult children are not necessarily immature or irresponsible, but they
are
deprived. Adult children have been denied the fundamental joys of childhood. If you never had the childhood you deserved, becoming an adult has little appeal. You don’t want to be an adult because it can only be seen as more sacrifice, and you’ve already sacrificed enough. You still want that childhood, the one that you missed. And until these issues are more satisfactorily resolved—until that child has been taken better care of—you will never feel truly ready for adulthood or for commitment.

While some of us were neglected, many of us were overprotected. We were not encouraged to develop our own autonomy. We were not encouraged to develop the skills and ego strength that would make us more capable of making adult commitments. We were taken care of not wisely, but too well. Chronologically we are adults, but psychologically we feel more like imposters.

Even if we want to grow up and want to make commitments, we are scared. We’re not really sure we can grow up. We have so little experience making adult decisions and taking on adult responsibilities that the leap seems enormous and overwhelming. Interestingly even if we’re not particularly good at taking care of ourselves, we feel smothered when anyone else tries to take care of us. Why? Probably because it feels as though they are perpetuating our struggle.

Being an adult also makes us think about aging, and that’s scary too. Aging conjures up images of illness and other limitations—physical, psychological, economic, and practical—that are a realistic cause for concern. At the same time we are constantly receiving overt and covert messages from a culture that celebrates youth and seems to have little interest in the rewards of aging.

Add all of this up and it’s not hard to understand why so many of us are fleeing from adulthood. We’re not ready, and we don’t want to be.

The Fear of Death

If few of us are ready to face adulthood, even fewer are prepared to face mortality. Let’s admit it, all of us are afraid of dying. But what does death have to do with commitment? Think about it. Most of us try to shut out the possibility of our own death. Marriage, with those magic words “till death do us part,” reminds us that we are not going to be around forever. And once we have completed the ritual of choosing a mate to whom we may be connected for the rest of our days, we are taking a very important step on the human journey that can’t help but end.

Many of us view commitment as giving up options. As we give up options, our lives narrow. For some people every commitment, no matter how large or how small, is a small death because it symbolizes fewer remaining choices and a future that is shrinking. For these men and women, refusing to make the commitment compromises that are necessary in life is a rather complicated way of trying to ward off death.

Many of the people we interviewed told us how alive they felt when they were
not
in a committed relationship. They might be in pain, they might be lonely, they might be unhappy—but that doesn’t seem to be the issue. The issue is death, and in a sense, to reject commitment is to reject growing up, to reject aging, and ultimately to reject death.

While everyone is afraid of dying, those of us who are most likely to be afraid are those who don’t feel as though we’ve had enough of a life. Once again it is the adult children who are most likely to feel cheated, and are most likely to be running from any hint of death. You can’t talk about death to people who feel they haven’t really had a life. And to these people, talking about commitment is tantamount to talking about death.

The Fear of Loving Too Much

There are men and women who hear the phrases “falling in love” and all they respond to is the sensation of falling. It’s frightening, and it makes them feel as though they are out of control. That scares them.

Some people have felt themselves fall so far in past relationships
that they cling tenaciously to a superficial level of reacting. If you have ever seen yourself “give away the store” or if you have any sense that you might not be able to protect yourself appropriately in a loving relationship, then this fear may strike a deep chord.