Free He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships by Steven Carter

her parents’ marriage as “deadly.” She says her father rarely says anything to her mother that is more meaningful than “pass the potatoes,” and hides behind the TV, refusing to pay attention to anything his wife has to say. When Lori was twenty-two, she was married to a man she describes as “extraordinarily unfaithful.” The marriage lasted only a few years. Since that time Lori has had only one other serious relationship, and that was with a married man. Lori does very little to improve her social life; if anything, she tends to spend a great deal of time alone. The men she finds attractive always seem to be involved elsewhere. Despite this, Lori is adamant about her desire for long-term commitment. We find it difficult to accept Lori’s statements about what she says she wants. We think that she can’t help but have a fair number of conflicts she is failing to examine.
    For example, written into just about everyone’s memory is the statistic that says that fifty percent of all couples end up divorcing. Now, think about it. If someone told you that everytime you crossed the street, there was a fifty-percent possibility that you would get hit by a car, chances are that each of your pedestrian outings would be clouded by anxiety and trepidation. At the very least you would increase your precautions, carefully looking each way, cautiously assessing the cars, the traffic lights, the crosswalks. That makes sense. Yet a large percentage of single men and women, knowing the divorce statistics, knowing—sometimes firsthand—the kind of pain involved in failed marriages, say that theyare very anxious to find a permanent commitment and that they feel no fear whatsoever. That doesn’t make sense. Considering what we all know, doesn’t it seem reasonable that all of us should be at least a little bit nervous about commitment?
    A great deal is written these days about denial and the effect it can have on our lives. In psychology denial is defined as an unconscious defense mechanism that we use to allay anxiety by negating important conflicts or unwanted impulses. People in denial are refusing to look at some of the conflicts and problems in their lives. This is a way of protecting ourselves from pain, particularly when that pain gets in the way of living. But denial is also how we stay stuck. If we don’t look at the truth in our lives, if we don’t honestly examine our conflicts and our fears, then we are denying our experiences, and we don’t have a basis from which to make constructive changes.
    Women, in particular, have a wide variety of reasons to deny commitment anxiety. They are sometimes under extreme family pressure to settle down, make a home, and produce grandchildren. Even as toddlers they were given dolls and dollhouses and homemaking paraphernalia. It seems to be assumed that marriage and family is something all women are supposed to want. No wonder women who feel the slightest ambivalence bury it.
    RATIONALIZING AWAY OUR COMMITMENT CONFLICTS
    Like denial, rationalization is a defense mechanism. It is a method that people employ to make unreasonable, or irrational, behavior appear reasonable. In other words we use it to explain away behavior that doesn’t always make sense—sometimes even to us. People who refuse to examine their commitment conflicts often find themselves acting out these conflicts. Typically this produces some strange behavior. Rationalization is often an essential tool in explaining this behavior away. Here’s how this works:
    Six months ago Marc, thirty-eight and once divorced, met Sally, a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée with a four-year-old child. The minute he saw her, he “flipped” over the way she looked. He says he fell in love with her and with her daughter almost immediately.
    “This was something I really thought I wanted. My first wifenever wanted children, and it was a major issue in our marriage. But Sally loved kids, and her daughter was wonderful. I liked the