Personal Involvement in writing the book "Choosing to Love'
You teach best what you most need to learn
Richard Bach, Illusions
If anyone had suggested to me several years ago that I had a problem with committing to people and to things in my life, I would have thought them way off the mark. I would have accepted that I had problems of one sort or another, but I would not have agreed that commitment was one of them. I never doubted my capacity to commit.
As I understood it, I had had a happy, nurturing childhood; I had grown up into a mature, responsible person; and whatever else was lacking, I had a strong moral base to my life. Lack of commitment, I thought, was the sort of thing that only afflicted people from emotionally and psychologically deprived backgrounds who carried these human scars into an adulthood plagued by feelings of inadequacy, behavioural inconsistency, and a kind of moral bankruptcy. In short, people totally alien to me.
Looking back at it now, there must have been numerous people - friends, colleagues, family - biting their tongues not to allow forth a few home truths on the matter. For the truths were that my life was riddled by the symptoms of a deep and profound fear of being nailed down to anything, or anyone.
I had only just made it through a training in social work. I had skills and talents, but no career because I would rarely stay in a job longer than a matter of months. I had struggled with a relationship for many years; but even after marriage and a child, I had not been able to get it all to hold together. I had few belongings apart from clothes and a record collection. I changed address so often that friends and family despaired of keeping their address books up to date. Things shifted so frequently for me that it was if the planet of my fife lacked the force of gravity.
So how was it that I - a man who had an ample degree of sensitivity and self-awareness, and a veritable Greek chorus of insightful peers - was unable to get an accurate reading on my own Achilles heel. After all, I was in the business of doing it for others; why could this physician not at least diagnose himself?
Well, it wasn't as if my ‘dabbling behaviour’ was unknown to me. Rather, it was that I regarded myself as in a process of seeking the right thing (relationship, career, geographical location, spiritual path) to fully engage my considerable capacities. I hadn't realised that I had a problem with committing because I was busy telling myself that I had not yet found what I wanted to commit to.
This thinking, while seeming realistic enough to me at the time, was seriously flawed. In fact, it was totally back-to-front in demanding that fulfilment precede commitment: reality works the other way. But warped though it was, that was my logic at the time. And it was carving a pathway in my life that was quite tangential to real happiness and could only lead to disillusionment and despair in the long term. It is the road taken by those who seek perfection, and it is a wide road: many people are ensnared and distracted by its haunting allure. Each workshop I run on the fear of commitment will have at least one person (usually male) who will be held as if in sorcery by the power of their desire for unattainable perfection.
It is an entrapment that persists. In my life, it could have continued almost indefinitely. But, as Blake pointed out, even though a man be a fool, if he persists in his folly long enough, he will eventually stumble upon wisdom. My stumbling occurred after a significant, but brief, relationship had bitten the dust for the same old reason (my refusal to commit), with me trotting out the same old excuse (she wasn't ‘the right one’).
My getting of wisdom began with a book handed to me by my dear friend and colleague, Kim Hopson. She had just been put through the wringer in classic fashion by one more man with a severe fear of commitment. A friend of hers, knowing what was happening for her, had given her the book Men Who Can't Love by Steven Carter and Julia Sokol. It sets out the typical behaviours of men who fear commitment in relationships. As she read it, she recognised with painful clarity the way in which she had been treated by the man she had been with. She also detected certain features which may well have applied to a particular male friend of hers! Always one to offer a guiding hand, she gave the book to me. Always one to accept a guiding hand, I read it ...
It was a most revealing experience. My reasons for not committing came to bear a hollow ring when placed alongside those same reasons, given again and again by many of the men described in the book. They sounded absurd when set beside the same patterns of avoidance which these men demonstrated. They became chillingly culpable when heard through the ears of the women who had been hurt by men who would not take responsibility for what they were doing in their involvement with them. Suddenly, my whole model of the world was turned on its head as the figure-ground relationship changed: it was no longer that the outer world or another person was unworthy of being committed to; rather, it was me who was constantly hot-footing it from anything in my life where I might have to show up and be accountable. And I was leaving a growing mound of emotional and psychological wreckage in my wake.
As I began to squarely face up to this issue of avoiding commitment as possibly the major problem in my life, an though a man be a fool, if he persists in his folly long enough, he will eventually stumble upon wisdom. My stumbling occurred after a significant, but brief, relationship had bitten the dust for the same old reason (my refusal to commit), with me trotting out the same old excuse (she wasn't ‘the right one’).
As I began to squarely face up to this issue of avoiding commitment as possibly the major problem in my life, an interesting thing began to occur: the issue started showing up in my counselling work. The relationship problems that people would give account of in the counselling room began to change in their complexion. Couples would describe the same dysfunctional communication patterns they always had, but my understanding of these began to shift. I started to notice that what would often underlie these patterns was a fundamentally different attitude to the relationship on the part of the two partners. And frequently the attitude was about commitment; about how fully each partner was prepared to give themselves to the other; about how deeply and intensely each person would allow themselves into the dance with the other. Basically, one partner-consciously or otherwise-would be seeking a level of involvement that the other person was unwilling to give; and it was from that fundamental disagreement that all the other complaints and problems in the relationship were springing.
At this point, I was increasingly able to identify where things were becoming unhinged, but I had no reliable way of working with the impasse at which the couple were stuck. If I turned to my own life, there too the fear of commitment was paralysing me. I began to look around for ways out of the strictures of this fear, but little was available. Almost all the literature focused on the woman who had been hurt by a commitment-fearing man. There was lots of advice about how to recognise and avoid ‘no-good’ men; how to protect oneself from his advances; how to tend one's emotional wounds after the damage had been done; even how to manipulate a commitment-phobic man into being a wonderful husband. All useful information in the appropriate context; but all directed at the woman.
There was nothing for the responsible man and/or couple who wanted to deal with the problem with integrity and relational equality. It was as if men could not be expected ever to change.
It has been said long and often that it is mostly women who end up carrying the responsibility when relationships run aground. Women take the wrap for ‘loving too much’, or making foolish choices, even though they're smart underneath it all. It's then a short step to telling women how they can manipulate and cajole their would-be partners into being committed spouses - again, the man's change is the woman's responsibility.
It was a tendency that I had long before noticed in couples counselling: women were always the healers, the nurturers. They would usually be the first one in with a way of fixing the relationship. And therein lay the danger: the woman finding a solution to the outward problems only perpetuated the underlying or structural problem in the way the two related; namely, that the woman was always the one taking responsibility for the couple's interaction.
Where, I wondered, was there a process that allowed the man to keep us his end of the deal and take some responsibility for his problem with commitment? For if he could do that, then he would also have altered the structure of the relationship by taking on a share of the healing role.
As I wrestled with the matter both personally and professionally, I began to develop some strategies for tackling the issue, and soon had the first draft of ‘An 11-Step Approach to Dealing with the Fear of Commitment’. I began to use it in my practice, first as a counselling tool, and later in a more structured way in workshops I began running on the fear of commitment.
These workshops were a learning experience for me in two specific ways. First, since they tackled the issue of commitment head-on, they tended to bring up more defences in participants (especially the men) than did counselling sessions. Time-limited and issue-focused, they acted as an emotional and psychological hothouse for people. In many cases, this allowed people to move quickly through issues connected with their fear, and to embrace new attitudes and behaviours. But in other cases, people would cling tightly to their defences and dig in their heels. What this instilled in me was a respect for people's defences, since those defences were there to protect some inner sense of self that the person believed was under threat. I have learned to acknowledge and be patient with denial or hostility when they come up, with the aim of moving beyond these to awareness and change.
The second thing which became abundantly clear to me in conducting the workshops was that fear of commitment was not an exclusively male problem. Much of the literature around on commitment is unequivocal to the point of being doctrinaire in its insistence that the problem does not cross gender lines. As far as many writers are concerned, women are the only ones truly equipped with relationship skills, leaving men ignorant and incompetent. Therefore, they say, women are adept at intimacy, self-disclosure, revealing and handling emotions and so forth. All men, on the other hand, are rank amateurs at intimacy and clumsy buffoons in the china shops of relating.
While there may be many elements of truth behind these types of generalisations, not only are they a form of reverse sexism, but they simply do not stack up against the facts. When I first began tracking commitment as an issue in my counselling work, colleagues would occasionally comment that I needed to remember that it was not just a male problem. They knew as much from their own professional experience. It was only when I began running workshops that I realised how true this was. Females comprised one quarter to one third of the participants in these workshops. And not all were there because they were or had been in relationships with men who would not commit. The majority were there because their own lives were being dominated by a fear of commitment. Their situations were the reverse of what I had considered typical: they were in relationships where the man wanted deeper, more constant and committed contact.
I was learning that in the final analysis, commitment and intimacy are issues of human relatedness, and that as such they cross the lines of gender. Many women have a fear of commitment, and many men do not.
Which then raises the question of why I have written this book as if the person who is fearful of commitment is male, and the person who wants greater commitment female? The answer is simply ease of reference. It is more convenient to communicate (for me to write and for you to read) on the basis of generalisation. But this is only so long as we understand that what is true in the general situation is often inaccurate in the particular. Men more often have a problem with commitment, so the book is structured along those lines, remembering that women can also have that same problem. And to act as reminders, throughout the text, I occasionally give examples of women who have a fear of commitment.
The aim of this book is not to judge, blame or condemn; it is not to add to the litany of grievances which presently stand between the sexes; it is not to create more roles of persecutor and victim. The act of relating is a vexed and troubled one most of the time. I operate on the assumption that in relating, people do the best they can with the inner resources they have available to them. So if they seem not to be doing as well as they could, I reason that what they have available to them is little, or less than little. I make no claim that this assumption is true. All I know is that it is a better place from which to start than anywhere else. Fundamentally, the aim of this book is to give people ways out of patterns which limit and sour their relationships and their lives. It is about gaining awareness of these patterns, and allowing people to choose in favour of more useful, self-enhancing ways of relating one to another.
(note: this article concerning my personal development in creating this book is included as the book's preface)
