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

chooses and say, “See, she was all wrong. Bad decision.” It’s different for women. Since they are typically the responders, not the pursuers, it’s easier for them to disguise their conflicts under a wide range of excuses, such as “there aren’t enough men out there,” or “the wrong men keep finding me,” or “all of the good ones are taken.”
    It doesn’t take a genius to say that “it takes two to dance,” but the sentiment is true nonetheless. A woman may feel more like the victim of a man with commitment problems than a perpetrator, but if she is involved with him, she is still dancing, and she is still participating. Her willingness to do so can reveal a great deal about her own issues with commitment.
    It’s important to acknowledge that more and more frequently we hear of relationships in which it is the woman who is leading the dance away from commitment—or is, at the very least, an equal partner. Her behavior can be every bit as obvious as that of any man who has ever been accused of commitmentphobia or “cold feet.”
    For both sexes the courage to commit goes hand in hand with building a loving, long-term relationship. If you resist examining your emotional history and the ways in which commitment anxieties may subtly, or not so subtly, be affecting your personal life, you run the risk of establishing and repeating self-defeating patterns.
    ACKNOWLEDGING YOUR DIFFICULTIES
    Whether you are a man or a woman, unresolved commitment conflicts reveal themselves in a myriad of ways. They are written in our fantasies and in our expectations, in our dreams and in our nightmares; they show up in the relationships we start and the relationships we avoid, in the people we choose and in the people who choose us. Within a relationship commitment issues show upin the ways we handle everything from time and money to holidays and vacations.
    Like Tom and Susan, many of us work long and hard to convince ourselves and everyone else in our lives that we don’t have any problems making a commitment. We always have an explanation as to why our relationships don’t work out, and typically that explanation has nothing to do with fear. We blame chemistry, we blame our culture, we blame the past loves who caused us pain, we blame circumstances, and most important we blame our partners’ problems. We put forth these explanations because we haven’t resolved our own conflicts.
    LABELING THE COMMITMENT PROBLEM AND WHY THAT MAKES US UNCOMFORTABLE
    As you read about the men and women in this book, you may find certain situations and patterns strikingly familiar, and yet you may resist wanting to see yourself as someone with “commitment problems.” We feel a great deal of your resistance may be directly related to a monster that we helped create.
    When we wrote Men Who Can’t Love , we introduced the term commitmentphobia as a way of describing people who experience claustrophobic reactions to the notion of “forever after.” We believe the word to be descriptive and accurate, but we appreciate the point of view of those who argue that it is not a “real” word. We also understand the annoyance of those who complain that it sometimes seems as though one cannot pick up a magazine or turn on a television talk show without hearing someone referred to as a commitmentphobic.
    For each of us, relationship experiences are unique. They are so complex and so varied that it’s hard to imagine that they fall under one label. To make them do so may feel unfair, judgmental, and almost insulting. None of us wants to think of ourselves as “types” of any kind, let alone commitmentphobic types. Nonetheless when external details are stripped away, human behavior tends to get reduced to a few basic dynamics. We believe very firmly that unresolved commitment conflict is one of these basic dynamics.
    Your relationship history is not a mystery, and it is not an accident. It may feel like an accident, and it may look like an