He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships Read Online Free PDF Page A

time before she settles down. She also worries that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Tom wants to be with someone who fits into a traditional wife-mother mold, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be that kind of woman. When Tom is with her, sometimes she feels suffocated and burdened, much as she did with her ex-fiancé, but when she doesn’t see Tom for a few days or when he seems to be ready to give up on the relationship, she becomes terrified of losing him.
    Tom thinks that because of her past experiences with men, Susan is unable to trust him. He is torn between wanting to prove that he is trustworthy and wanting to forget the whole thing. Much as Tom says he loves Susan, he is growing annoyed with what he sees as Susan’s withholding and he is thinking about seeing other women. He wonders, if he really loved Susan, would he be thinking about other women? And there is something else: when he thinks about the reality of marrying Susan, he begins to get a squeamish feeling in the pit of his stomach. Is it possible that what his friends say is true—that Tom is only interested in any woman so long as she is hard to get and that the minute it looks as though it could get real, he backs away? He says he doesn’t think so. He says he wants to settle down, but he wants to retain his sense of freedom too. In the right relationship he is sure he can have both. Is it possible that Susan isn’t the right woman for him either?
    Does Tom have a problem with commitment? And what aboutSusan’s difficulties with commitment? What is going wrong in this relationship?
    Here’s what we think: When it comes to establishing a working relationship, we think both Tom and Susan are unable to confront the contradictory quality of their behavior. This is spelled out by the choices they have made, by the choices they have avoided, by their pattern in and out of relationships, and by the words they use to describe their feelings. Both Tom and Susan claim that they want nothing more than to find Ms. or Mr. Right and settle down in a committed relationship, but we think they are unable to recognize how they are undermining this possibility.
    Tom, for example, acknowledges that he may be unclear about what he wants. Because two other women have been very hurt by his actions, he has a fair amount of guilt about some of his behavior. Nonetheless he thinks a large part of his romantic past falls into the unfortunate-accident category, and he is certain that once he is married to the right person, all of his conflicts will disappear.
    If anything, Susan finds it even harder than Tom to believe that she has any commitment issues. For example, she doesn’t think that her broken engagement proves anything except that her fiance wasn’t Mr. Right. She knows that at least two of the men in her life may have had issues with commitment, but she doesn’t see what that has to do with her. She is sure she wants a family. She remembers how committed she felt when she was with Ben and even how committed she was during her college crush. If either of these men had suggested planning a life together, she would have done so in an instant.
    THE MALE-FEMALE DIFFERENCE
    Acting out commitment conflicts is just one more thing that men and women sometimes do differently. Tom and Susan’s behavior patterns reflect some of those differences. They also point out how much easier it is for a woman to conceal her commitment issues from both herself and the rest of the world. There are two reasons for this: First, we have been conditioned to recognize the signs and attitudes of a man who is avoiding a committed relationship, but we have been so conditioned to believe that all “normal” women want marriage that we have not yet learned to recognize these same signs and attitudes in a woman. And in our society the man still does much of the initiating and choosing, and that makes it easier to see how his pattern is unfolding. We can look at the partners a man