He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (35 page)

If you have active conflicts:
Although you may begin a relation
ship with a great deal of flourish and involvement, you start to have claustrophobic sensations of being stuck as soon as it appears that your partner is open and available for commitment. You are usually aware of your conflict and tend to leave yourself with an escape route in everything you do. You may choose partners who are so “wrong” or difficult that you always have a built-in excuse for leaving the relationship. This means that you always have a hidden agenda that includes a variety of ways in which you can exit the relationship. In your head, no matter how long-term or short-term the relationship is, you always have one foot out the door. Incidentally this can also be true of someone who has been married for years.

Typically the better or more settled the relationship becomes, the more likely you are to feel this conflict. It is this active conflict that often drives someone to walk out of a marriage the day before (or after) buying a new house, shortly before (or after) the birth of a child, or immediately before (or after) the wedding. This conflict almost always creates a plethora of mixed messages and a long string of “I love you, but …” messages, both spoken and unspoken.

Often this conflict combines with others to give you the ammunition necessary to leave a relationship or sabotage its development.

If you have passive conflicts:
This is the classic setup for choosing relationships that by definition can’t work out long-term. You tend to be drawn to relationships in which distance is a given or to partners who are circumstantially or emotionally unavailable. Often they are so actively commitmentphobic that it is blatantly apparent, even to you. They do nothing to activate your own commitmentphobic anxiety, and this frees you to feel nothing but love. Frequently you are completely focused on getting a commitment from someone who is completely incapable of making one.

Because you are so rarely in relationships in which commitment is a possibility, you’re not likely to be aware of this conflict until some twist of fate disrupts your pattern. We have, for example, interviewed a great many women who, after a series of disastrous relationships, settle into a marriage and for the first time, much to their amazement, experience what it means to feel trapped and anxious.

For passives, perhaps the most telling sign that this conflict exists is your ability to understand and sympathize with the conflicted behavior of your profoundly uncommitted and commitmentphobic partners.

I WANT A COMMITMENT, BUT I DON’T EVER WANT TO FEEL LIMITED OR RESTRAINED BY THE COMPROMISES AND OBLIGATIONS OF COMMITMENT
.

This conflict presents one of the clearest contradictions. Everyone knows that relationships are full of obligations and require compromise. Yet there are vast numbers of people who struggle with this fact. How do they act this out?

If your fears are directly related to a belief that couples exist as one unit and have no boundaries between them, what better way to make certain that you are never limited by a relationship than to limit the relationship itself? Set up your own boundaries and rules of behavior—usually involving an unreasonable degree of spontaneity.

If you have active conflicts:
You tend to make it clear in a myriad of ways that you don’t want demands, restraints, or obligations. The most typical:

• You set up boundaries, boundaries, boundaries to keep the relationship contained and to assure yourself that your partner has few expectations. Some people start out the relationship by firmly establishing boundaries; others wait until they feel their freedom threatened.
  

• You insist upon spontaneity, spontaneity, spontaneity. This can’t help but keep your partner off balance.
  

If you have passive conflicts:
Because you have a need to keep a relationship loose and nonrestrictive, you tend to make few demands. Unfortunately this often attracts people who recognize this quality in you and take advantage of it. For example, perhaps you are a woman with an ideal of a balanced relationship in which everything “flows” naturally between partners and no demands need be made. Understanding a desire for spontaneity, you may
initially make few demands—until your partner has taken such liberty in acting out conflicts that you are completely off balance.

Perhaps you are a woman who thinks of herself as strong and independent with her own life and her own interests. You’re looking for a loving peer, a best friend—not a meal ticket. Why do you, of all women, keep meeting men who can’t even fulfill the handful of reasonable expectations that you have? Or perhaps you’re a man who thinks of himself as liberated in terms of women’s needs. You’re prepared to be supportive of a woman’s career and her life. Why do you, of all men, keep meeting women who believe a request for a steady Saturday night date is destroying the spontaneity of the relationship?

Think about it this way. Perhaps you are attracting primarily those who would immediately run away from someone with more traditional expectations. Often you are so understanding about issues such as boundaries and spontaneity that by the time you are prepared to call somebody on his/her attitude, you are in too deep to be able to walk away. Perhaps you have so many of your own boundaries that you are immediately put off by anyone who looks as though he/she would want a very traditional family structure with a great deal of “togetherness.”

I WANT A COMMITMENT, BUT I DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP MY INDIVIDUALITY AND MY SENSE OF SELF
.

What happens when you want a committed relationship but believe that once in such a relationship you will be asked to give up your individuality and your sense of self? A very common reaction is to start guarding everything that you believe makes you special. This can make you vigilant about protecting everything you do, think, and own.

One’s territory is frequently viewed as an extension of self. That’s why this conflict often makes us think, I
need more room
. What we mean is we need room to be ourselves, room to grow, room to move about as we wish. Our need for space, whether it be emotional or physical, is very much tied to our need for individuality and for a sharply defined sense of self.

“Let me do it my way, get out of my way.” “I’ll think what I
want to think, get out of my head.” “I’ll be who I want to be, leave me alone.” All of these are battle cries in domestic disagreements, whether they be between two partners or a parent and child. This is the conflict that is most closely tied to one’s need for emotional space. The difficult thing about this is that not all of us are conscious of how threatened we feel. All we know is that we can barely breathe.

One frequently voiced desire is to always retain a space of one’s own. This wish may be particularly true of women who have a fear (shaped by historical fact) of being asked to give up too much of themselves in return for a commitment.

If you have active conflicts:
Although you may be pulled by an urge to merge, you tend to announce your need for individuality in a variety of ways. These mixed messages confuse and upset your partners. When you announce your need for space, for example, they typically become insecure.

Sometimes instead of looking for partners who are equals, you choose those who are overly passive and easily dominated. Perhaps they may give you a sense that they will provide a “cheerleader” role in your life; that way you can assert your individuality without having to compromise or make shared decisions. Ultimately you may find their passivity suffocating and may reject them for the very reasons that you found them attractive.

If you have passive conflicts:
You may be attracted to those with a highly defined sense of individuality for two reasons: (1) You respect this kind of personality; and (2) You may believe that they will, in turn, respect your need for individuality and perhaps even help you develop a stronger sense of self. Ultimately the reverse may turn out to be the case, and you may find yourself being overwhelmed by someone else’s agenda.

Because you are made insecure by a partner who announces a need for even more space than you require, you tend to get clutchy. This of course gives your partner the sense that his/her individuality or space is being threatened.

I WANT A COMMITMENT, BUT I DON’T WANT TO BE CONTROLLED
.

I WANT A COMMITMENT, BUT I DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP CONTROL
.

These particular conflicts, which speak to just about everyone, are direct offshoots of the previous one. To get a sense of how control issues influence a commitment conflict, you have to ask yourself what pushes your control buttons. Are you sensitive to others’ moods? Are you easily controlled by anger? Are you easily controlled by guilt? Are you controlled by money? Are you controlled by fear? Are you controlled by love? What is it that makes you feel that someone is controlling you and your behavior? Which “spaces” in your life do you need to control? Do you allow anyone else to share your “space”? Do you have “rules”?

There are so many different ways in which someone with controlling tendencies can make rules. They can be about anything from the use of the kitchen sink to the way to spend a vacation. When you combine commitment issues with controlling behavior, the control usually involves ways in which one’s space can or cannot be shared.

If you have active conflicts:
You will tend to try to stay in control of everything that’s going on in a relationship. The boundaries and “rules” that you establish will often serve effectively to make certain that no one ever controls you. Your relationships are often centered around your needs, and you choose partners who will go along with this. Often you have a
“my
life,”
“my
house,”
“my
rules” attitude. Sometimes this makes you feel guilty, and then you feel controlled by guilt; this may make you respond with resentment and anger. If you care for someone, the intensity of your feelings may make you feel that someone else has the power to control you. This, too, can make you angry and resentful.

If you have passive conflicts:
Although you are probably very much aware of your antipathy toward people who try to control you, you may be so afraid of “rocking the boat” that you rarely confront control issues within your relationships—until after marriage.

Nonetheless your partner’s insistence on controlling everything can leave you feeling as though you are powerless and out of control. Because you have inadequate power, you feel driven to
get more control. This is often a motivating factor in your persistence in maintaining destructive relationships. Your inability to tolerate the feeling of having no control, understandable though it may be, can be a large part of what makes you almost desperate in your attempts to get resolution and closure.

Incidentally people with major commitment issues rarely engage in small domestic squabbles before marriage, and sometimes even after. They are usually so busy dealing with large concerns that they may never get around to arguing about the details of living—how high or low to keep the thermostat, for example. Instead they are usually fighting about much bigger issues such as whether to get or stay married.

If you have conflicts around the issue of control, here are some things to watch out for:

• If you think control is directly associated with money, you may always choose partners whose financial status reflects your concerns. You may, for example, gravitate toward those who have less money than you do.
  

• If you fear being controlled by anger, you may always choose partners who can’t express their feelings.
  

• If you worry about being controlled by guilt, you may choose partners who are so impossible that there is no way that you could ever feel guilty.
  

UNIVERSAL COMMITMENT CONFLICTS

Some conflicts touch all of us to one degree or another. They appear to be part of the price of being human in this contemporary global society. For example:

I WANT A COMMITMENT, BUT ONLY IF IT’S MAGIC AND IT’S WITH MY INTENDED SOUL MATE
.

We’ve all been to the same kinds of movies. We all want to “hear bells” and “feel the earth move.” But some of us are so invested in
finding perfect romance that we have to guard against a tendency to be more interested in magic than we are in commitment.

What does it mean to want a realistic commitment, but only with someone who meets all your fantasy “soul mate” requirements? If you feel this way, you run the risk of spending large chunks of your adult life either absorbed in obsessive relationships or with no relationship at all. Typically you are often feeling lonely and fantasizing about what might have been in relationships that didn’t work out, what should be happening in existing relationships, or what might happen in relationships that have yet to take place.

If you have active conflicts:
You tend to pursue partners who look as though they will fulfill a personal fantasy and then reject them when it is clear that they are mere earthlings. In your dreams about what it means to be part of a couple, you always feel a romantic high. When that high fades in your real life, you become convinced that you are making a mistake. You have to guard against walking away from solid relationships in favor of unrealistic dreams.

If you have passive conflicts:
Your dreams have such power in your life that you tend to superimpose them on all of your relationships; therefore it’s almost impossible for you to deal with the concept of limited relationships. Once someone activates your responses, you want to jump right in, bringing your whole dream with you. Although you find this difficult to believe, you are typically as committed to a dream as you are to a partner. For example, no matter how good, bad, or indifferent your partners may be, you often imbue them with all the qualities of your dream.