Fear of Commitment?
This is the 4th post in an ongoing series on Relationships. Part 3 was on The Opposite of Settling is Unsettling. How the word settling has an inherently defeated connotation and that many times, the best people are right in front of you. My hope is that this series supports and intentionalizes more quality, Godly relationships; and stops some of the childish bickering that happens through an insightful and funny series.
One Rutgers University study found that 94 percent of people in their 20s say the first requirement in a spouse is someone who qualifies as a soul mate. Just as surprising, 87 percent think they’ll actually find that person 'when they are ready'. A culture suspicious of God nevertheless has brazenly embraced some sort of forceful and intelligent destiny that brings two lovelorn souls together! The real danger in this line of thinking is that many people mistake a storm of emotion as the identifying mark of their soul mate. When the music fades and the relationship requires work, one or both partners suddenly discover that they were 'mistaken': this person must not be their soul mate after all! Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so much work. Next they panic. Their soul mate must still be out there! Such people can’t break up or get to divorce court fast enough, lest someone steal their 'one true soul mate' meant only for them. When we get married for trivial reasons, we tend to seek divorce for trivial reasons.
Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat. In the real world, fear can be acquired by a frightening traumatic accident. Our mind associates experiences with things, good or bad. When I ask people why they don't like certain foods, foods that are sooo good I can't understand why someone wouldn't like it, I get confused. ie guacamole. After asking more questions like: why don't you like this? They usually explain how one of their traumatic accidents like vomiting or the stomach flu was associated with that certain food. It could have been since they were 6 years old. It doesn't matter. It happens all the time. For myself, I had the stomach flu earlier this year. I was blowing up from both ends. That morning I had an abnormally large bowl of oatmeal and after my experience, my mind began to associate the frightening ordeal of vomiting with my large bowl of oatmeal. Now I know it couldn't have been the oatmeal because I had been having a bowl every morning for the last two months. It could have been the sushi I had the night before... But because I had an irregularly large bowl that day, and the fact that I vomited that night, I began to connect oatmeal to vomit. So there went my oatmeal plan for 4 months. I thought it was the grossest thing out there. I gagged at the sight and smell of oatmeal.
Fear is the association of certain things with an undesireable outcome that is based off past traumatic events. Fear does not even have to happen to you for it to affect you! Other people can cast their fears onto you! How crazy! You may not even know why you are afraid of spiders but because you heard all these terrible stories of bad spider bites, the black widow, etc. You associate spiders as being these horrible little creatures that come to haunt and you can't even lay a finger on them anymore. Nah, even be in the same room! Another example is the fear of the economy. The doom and gloom idea can be something that personally affected you before and now you are hesitant to get back into the market, or a traumatic scary event that happened to a close relative or friend who keeps telling you the horrible-ness of their situation. Fear cripples. Fear demoralizes. Fear binds. Fear is a horrible way to live life.
Fear of heights: That feeling of falling. Maybe you fell and hurt yourself when you were younger.
Fear of spiders: The icky, guey, grimy. Why are you so, so scared of these guys?
Fear of Rejection/Commitment:
My introduction brings me to what I want to talk about. The fear of rejection and the fear to commit. No one likes to be rejected. You go after things you want. So to be rejected has a sense of personal defeat. That I am not good enough. Why are guys afraid to ask someone? The fear of rejection. Somewhere in their junior high and high school days, we asked a girl to the winter formal or the high school prom and they said thedreaded two letter word: NO or pretty much got a fluffed up 'I think you're so nice, such a great friend, my mom said, blah, blah, blah answer'
What happened afterwards? The students around would laugh and giggle like mischievous high schoolers. You would have a sense of complete shattering of your manhood. Your friends belittling your upfrontness with piercing darts of ahhh-haha-ha's. You were defeated. PWNED.
The fear of rejection will bind you to do nothing. The game is over when it is over. How do you really know if she will say no or yes? By asking! Thinking she will say no and analyzing every scenario is not the indicator. Replaying every past situation doesn't help either. Oh, she didn't say hi to me, so she is completely ignoring me, she doesn't like me. Oh, she didn't text back in 5 minutes, I am not important. Dude, we all have lives.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. —Ambrose Redmoon
Now there are the other guys who may not be afraid of rejection but they are afraid of commitment. Tying back with post 3 on Settling, People think if they commit, there may be someone better that comes along. So we do nothing. The fear to commit or the lack of commitment solely lies on the fact that you are not satisfied with what you have. So what makes us afraid to commit? Maybe it was a while back when you got the first gift or the first prize, but found out there was a better, cooler prize afterwards.
Ironically, in these romantic relationships, the commitmentphobic partner craves what he/she fears most: love and connection. This paradoxical craving for a frightening reality leads to a confusing and destructive pattern of seduction and rejection. The results are emotionally devastating. -Wiki (Fear of Commitment)
To assuage their anxieties, many people with commitment fears become fantasy-driven, using their active imaginations to fill in for the lack of emotional security and closeness in their lives. Of course, these fantasies pose additional problems because no potential partner, car, or job can ever live up to the fantasy.
Fears can be broken.
It just takes courage.
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