He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (16 page)

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Your responses are so strong that you seem to lose all ability to establish reasonable boundaries; this is particularly true when your love object is busily placing barriers in your path
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Instead of merely opening yourself up to the possibility of slowly building a stable relationship, you immediately position yourself for a complete merger. This means that you are physically available, sexually available, and emotionally available for any and all demands that your love object makes. Without doing anything concrete to prove his or her value to you, the other person becomes thoroughly incorporated into your fantasies, and the hold on you becomes so intense that it seems as though it has a life of its own.

The degree to which you allow your boundaries to fall is often in direct proportion to the number and types of barriers being placed in your path. This is a very important characteristic of those whose commitment conflicts are acted out passively.

If, as is often the case, the object of your passion needs distance and is made uncomfortable—or actually phobic—by the expectations of others, then your attitude and behavior serve to intensify his or her fears. Instead of realizing this and backing off, you almost take pride in your power to evoke such strong responses.

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You have inappropriate responses to negative information
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He’s married…. “So what, that could change tomorrow.”

She’s moving to Japan…. “Who cares, we’ll write.”

He’s got twelve children…. “It’s a small adjustment, that’s all.”

She has overwhelming medical problems and no health insurance…. “What’s the problem? I’ll get a second job.”

He’s been divorced three times and has a substance-abuse problem…. “Poor guy, it must have been those first three wives.”

She’s chronically promiscuous…. “Not an issue now that she’s going to be mine.”

He’s completely unfaithful, singularly untruthful, and totally
disreputable…. “Nobody’s perfect, he just needs to get more in touch with his feelings.”

He never speaks…. “Not to worry, I don’t need that much attention.”

We could go on endlessly with the exercise. The fact is that once someone with passive commitment conflicts is turned on by an inappropriate or unavailable partner, nothing seems to be able to quench that ardor. Totally in love and totally out of touch, they will do whatever is necessary to protect their interest in impossible dreams.

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When rejected by your love interest, you typically have inappropriate responses to the pain
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No one enjoys rejection, and few of us handle it well. But people who are passively avoiding commitment seem to have particularly unfortunate responses. Instead of looking for a more requited love, passive avoiders frequently fall into a mode of living that can best be described as round-the-clock yearning. Thus they have a full-time excuse to stay away from real relationships, favoring fantasy and dreams about what could have been. Clearly unhappy and miserable in the “yearning” state, they are nonetheless so totally engaged by their nonrelationships that they are often incapable of looking elsewhere. Time and again, for reasons they don’t understand, they find themselves playing out the role of victim, and they don’t know how to change this.

“WHAT SHOULD I DO?”—LOOKING FOR ADVICE

After the publication of our first book,
Men Who Can’t Love
, we found ourselves inundated with letters and phone calls from women who wanted to know what they could do to resolve their relationships with the commitmentphobic men with whom they were involved. The only advice we could give them was advice that, for the most part, they didn’t want to hear. When the relationships were self-destructive, as they usually were, we told them to pull away, take care of themselves, develop their own sense of
self-worth, and become more self-protective in the future. We told them that pursuing someone who is running away almost always fails. We told them that when a man feared commitment, he genuinely felt a sense of being trapped; and engulfing him with more love or understanding or acceptance rarely worked.

Just about all of the women we spoke to ultimately extricated themselves from the feelings that were connecting them to hopeless situations. But then a fair number of the same women got in touch with us to describe still other hopeless situations with still other reluctant partners. It was these women, most of them loving, intelligent, perceptive, and sensitive, who brought us face-to-face with what it means to act out our commitment issues in a passive fashion.

Unlike many of their actively commitmentphobic partners, these women could not be faulted for causing pain or unhappiness. They were never rejective or withholding. They placed no unreasonable barriers between themselves and those they cared about. All they did was continue to fall in love with men who were walking disasters as far as the potential for commitment was concerned. And they were unable to see the pattern in their own behavior. The defense they often used, and one that, we must admit, we helped them use, was that men are wary of commitment and that as women they were unwitting victims.

At about the same time we began hearing from men who had read the book. They described the way they, too, had been hurt by women who behaved according to the seductive/rejective pattern described in the book. Each of them typically explained away the problem by saying that “women don’t appreciate a nice guy.”

These men sounded just like the women. Clearly both sexes had histories indicating that they were infinitely more attracted to partners who were running away than to those who were available.

A HISTORY OF ROMANTIC PAIN

It doesn’t take an Einstein to know that a pattern of finding the wrong partners leads to a great deal of unhappiness. Because they are often depressed and lonely, passive avoiders find it difficult to
believe that their own actions contribute to the distress in their lives. The vast majority of these men and women are capable and well-intentioned. They are often high achievers and successful at their work; they don’t like to think of themselves as self-destructive or masochistic. Yet in almost every instance, when you look at the partners they choose, it seems inconceivable that they couldn’t have predicted the outcome.

To better understand how devastating a long history of passive avoidance can be, let’s take a look at Andrea, a thirty-six-year-old fabric designer who has a clear pattern of passively avoiding commitment.

Andrea, a tall pretty redhead, tells everyone she meets that she wants to get married. In fact she spends at least an hour every day talking about this, either to her friends or to her mother. She says that the only thing missing from her life is a committed love relationship. People who meet her don’t understand why she doesn’t have one. Andrea is artistic, charming, smart, feminine, and highly intuitive, and it seems difficult to believe that she hasn’t been able to find what she says she wants.

Her history offers some insight into her difficulties. Right after college while her friends were getting engaged and picking out silverware patterns, Andrea—who thought all of this was very provincial and dull—met and fell in love with a young man who was on a brief visit to this country. After several highly charged dates he returned to his native France, promising to write and promising to return someday. He was no sooner in the air than Andrea began to write him the first of hundreds of long, intense letters. She says:

“The letters were my only way of staying in touch. I wanted him to know who I was and what I felt and believed in. I wrote to him steadily for about six months. He would also write, but not as frequently—perhaps one letter or a postcard every couple of weeks.”

Andrea excused his less-than-enthusiastic correspondence by telling herself that because English was his second language, he was not very good at expressing himself. What she found more difficult to excuse was the primary barrier to their ever getting together—his family’s attitude.

“I was very much in love with him, and I think he was with me
also, but it wasn’t very simple. He was Catholic, and his family was opposed to the relationship. We talked, in our letters, about getting together, and finally I went to France. His family wasn’t very nice to me, and he had changed. He was very withholding.”

Despite the cool reception she received, Andrea continued to hold out hopes for this relationship for close to two years. During this entire period, while she was in her mid-twenties, Andrea went out on no other dates and made no attempts whatsoever to meet anyone else. In other words she was behaving like the typical wife, only without a husband. She stayed home much of the time reading; she took a course in European cuisine so that she would be able to cook for her beloved when they finally got together. She also took several courses in French literature and tried to learn to play the piano. Her career flourished, and most of her pleasure came from her work and her rich fantasy life. During this period Andrea met at least one other man who had an interest in her. She toyed with the idea of seeing him, but decided, even though she found him attractive, that she didn’t want to be unfaithful, in spirit or in deed, to the man five thousand miles away.

After she recovered from this infatuation, Andrea vowed never again to fall for someone who didn’t live on the same continent. And she didn’t. Instead she fell in love with someone who worked in the same industry. Gary, her new love interest, was appropriate in all ways except one. He was, by his own description, sexually ambivalent. Although he dated women, he confessed to Andrea that sexually he was drawn primarily to men. Nonetheless Andrea was overwhelmingly attracted to him, and she was sure that he felt the same way about her.

“Gary and I quickly became best friends. We did everything together—everything except sleep together, that is. He would tell me that he had never really been sexually interested in a woman, but I found it difficult to believe. When we were together, there were sexual sparks all over the place. He was very open about his sexual conflicts and his preferences. But I guess I didn’t really believe him. He was very attractive to me, and we had a very good friendship. It’s true that because of our involvement, I didn’t look at any other men.”

Gary was offered a job in California, and although Andrea had hopes that he might ask her to go with him, he moved by himself.
This move crushed all of Andrea’s dreams, and she sank into a deep depression that lasted another year. At the end of that year she entered therapy and transferred all of her feelings onto her young male therapist. Andrea stayed with the therapist for a year and a half, during which time she made no effort to meet any suitable partners. While in therapy she found herself more and more involved with fantasies concerning her doctor. When he got engaged, bought a brownstone, and moved his office into his home, Andrea could no longer avoid the reality that he had a personal life that did not include her. She became very angry at herself and at the therapist. She decided that she had been spending a great deal of money for few results and she terminated treatment.

For the next year and a half there were no men in Andrea’s life and few fantasies, and she was quite happy.

“This period was definitely one of the best in my life. My work was good, and my life was quite full. I have always had good women friends, and I spent time with them. Not being involved with anyone, not being depressed about anyone, and not thinking about anyone can be a very good experience. My head was free just to enjoy life, and for the first time that’s what I did. Then I met Martin.”

Andrea and Martin, a highly flirtatious forty-two-year-old doctor, met at a Christmas party. Martin was in the process of divorcing his second wife, and he was immediately taken with Andrea. On their second date he told Andrea that he had been unfaithful to both of his wives, as well as to just about every other woman he had ever been with, and that he didn’t plan to marry again unless he was sure that the sexual attraction was so great that he would never, ever consider an extramarital affair. He also implied that he was so attracted to Andrea that she might indeed be the woman who would fulfill this need. Andrea took on the challenge, and although the sex was already “fantastic,” she tried to be even more provocative and sexually interesting. She invested a small fortune in lingerie, she bought harem costumes, she took up belly dancing. It wasn’t quite enough.

When the relationship was less than four months old, Andrea discovered that Martin had resumed having sex with his second wife, who had become more “interesting” to him after the divorce.
Now Andrea is totally distraught and devastated. All she knows is that Martin is the love of her life, the “prince” she always dreamed of. She is in pain and feels overwhelmingly obsessed.

Hearing Andrea’s story, it’s easy to see that she becomes too quickly involved with the wrong men. Clearly she disregards the warning signals that should inform her of dead-end choices. Furthermore, even after she sees the problems, she stays involved, hoping for a miracle.

PASSIVE COMMITMENT CONFLICTS AND THE MALE-FEMALE DIFFERENCE

Passive behavior patterns are traditionally associated with women, and passive commitment conflicts are no different. Traditionally it is an easier role for women. As painful as it may be always to play the victim within your relationships, a woman has rarely had to accept blame. As long as she assumes the passive role, she can continue to point a finger at the many “difficult” or “commitmentphobic” men who have relentlessly pursued her, only to turn tail and run. If nothing else, her dramatic relationship history doesn’t automatically read like it’s her fault. Can she be blamed if the only men she meets have a lot of problems? There is a great deal of cultural support for any woman who continues to find herself in such a role.

For a man with a passive commitment pattern it is a very different story. Men generally are expected to be the aggressors, the pursuers, the hunters. This gives them much more control in the way relationships begin. How does a man pursue a woman passively? How does a man justify all of his bad choices? He can’t say, “The wrong women keep asking me out.” The “wrong” women may keep making themselves available to him, but he is still the one doing the choosing. He is not waiting for someone to ask him out, and he is not reluctantly giving in to an ardent pursuer. He
is
the ardent pursuer—the ardent pursuer of women who put up unreasonable boundaries, women who don’t want a commitment, women who are emotionally, physically, or geographically unavailable.