I have super commitment-phobia and it's destroying my relationships, and I want to overcome it

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m 34, soon to be 35. I’ve been in a lot of relationships since 2016 and almost every single one of them was ruined by my fear or failure to take things to the marriage level. Some of them were women who were unsuitable, but 3 of them were women who would have been suitable but I failed to realize it until too late (in each instance, they also pressured me for a marriage decision within mere months, and I couldn’t say “yes” because I wasn’t feeling a green light yet. The relationship ended and then I regretted it months later when I finally realized their suitability.)

Now, in 2022, I find myself in the same situation (in a relationship with a woman we’ll call Wendy), and I’d give anything for clarity and to avoid repeating the same excruciating cycle again, but I’m still in “brown light” territory - having to make a stop or go decision about Wendy when I can’t tell if a marriage ‘traffic light’ is green or red, so to speak.

Part of this stems from having seen so many unhappy marriages. My mother was (and is) a very destructive person, my sister divorced her husband, my aunt divorced my uncle, I’ve firsthand seen miserable marriages in my church when someone married someone they didn’t truly love, and I can’t help but always worry pessimistically about marriage - having also been told many times that being single is better than being in an unhappy marriage.

Any advice would be welcome. I have seen marriages where someone plunged ahead despite feeling cold feet about it, and they were disastrous. But again, I’ve also regretted breakups where I could have warmed up more to a woman if she’d given me more time.

The issue with Wendy also is that we go to the same church and there is heavy meddling and pressure from church people for all relationships to lead to marriage - almost like they are a “relationship oversight committee.” Even if I were to ask for more time, they’d pressure and lecture us to hurry.

2

Several independent paragraphs not adding up to an essay …

Screw all the people at church. They should have no input to your thinking, your feelings, Wendy’s thinking or feeling, or anything else. If they can’t / won’t butt out, leave that meddlesome bunch of losers and join a different church, or none at all. Your happiness is more important than their approval. More important to you, more important to Wendy, and quite frankly, more important to your / their God if they actually believe in anything Jesus taught as opposed to the crap US preachers teach instead.

No marriage is perfect. No person is perfect for you, nor you for them. If you, or she, have/has defined “green light” to be the absolute absence of any negative features no matter how minor, you/she have defined success out of existence. That’s a mistake IMO.

IMO/IME marriage is right when you’re ready for “us” to be more important than “me.”. And when she is equally ready. If only one values “us” above “me”, that person is prepping to be comprehensively screwed by the other who places “me” above “us”. How can you tell? First by asking them to explain their attitude on this topic. Second by watching what they actually do to ensure it matches what they say they do.


My creds: 33 argument-free years married to my first wife. Who died last year after a long illness. And now the better part of one year married to a very different woman of very different nature and interests. But who nonetheless understands “us” vs “me” in the same way I do. My new life is not perfect. It’s just far better than being alone, minor aggravations aside. But with “us” over “me” as both of our Prime Directives this is easy. And monster satisfying.

3

I think you should talk to a professional about your commitment phobia. It may be perfectly rational in your case, but a professional can help you work through it if you decide you want to try to “fix” it. If after that you still find it hard to “pull the trigger,” either accept that’s how it is and try to find someone willing to wait until you are ready, or just enjoy being single… there are worse things in the world.

I made a mistake and was married for five years before getting out. I married the wrong person for the wrong reason. I was then single for 15 years and frankly enjoyed the freedom to do what I wanted, whenever I wanted, with whomever I wanted. I watched my daughter grow up, but once she graduated high school, I felt the need to settle down again and started dating seriously. I’ve been married this time for 20 years and counting. YMMV.

4

This. THER. A. PY.

Mind you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing not to get married if you don’t really want to. (Are you entirely sure that you really do regret those three—three!—ex-girlfriends whom you’ve now decided, from a safe distance, “would have been suitable”? Is it possible that you honestly didn’t love them enough to marry them, but are telling yourself that you should have—now that it’s conveniently too late to change your decision—because you don’t want to face the possibility that maybe you just don’t really want to marry, or at least haven’t yet met somebody you really want to marry?)

A dumbass random internet stranger like me can’t answer any of the questions you have, but with luck a counselor will be able to help you find answers for them.

5

Yet another +1 for therapy, or rather, counseling. Because you may or may not have commitment-phobia, you may just have a hard time a) deciding exactly what you want (not uncommon) and b) having a hard time communicating it (very, very common).

I say this because your comments that you realized “after the fact” that several of your prospects were indeed good partners, but you felt rushed to commit and avoided it when given the choice. This is where both above points become key. Figuring out what you want and need in a partner is a darn good idea, although demanding a partner who fits every particular 100% is a good path towards disappointment. Being able to TELL your perspective partner, in positive language (not the bankrupt “It’s not you, it’s me.”) is just as important.

If you figure out A, and how to do B, and still can’t commit, then yeah, therapy may be needed. And I also echo @LSLGuy’s feelings about the Church pressure. I know several of my friends from my younger years who were pressured by family and faith that in order to date for more than 3-6 months (and presumably to even consider sex) a ring was required, and ended up in very unhappy and brief marriages.

My mother and father in law were… quietly unhappy that my wife and I were living together for about 4 years before we decided to get married. My wife was honest enough to tell me that she was slightly uncomfortable as well after the first year (and we’d been dating 2 years before we lived together), but understood that since my parents had a bitter divorce when I was 8, that I was dealing with my own issues and assumptions.

But we’re still together, although I won’t say argument free all the time, and about to hit 20 years married (4 years living together before That, and 2 years dating before THAT) and are the official benchmark for all of our family and friends of this generation. Some of which are on their third partner/spouse.

6

It doesn’t sound like commitment phobia to me, more like you inhabit a community where getting married in haste seems to be the norm.

How long, exactly, have you been dating Wendy? I wouldn’t dream of marrying someone until I’d been with them (and cohabited) for at least 2-3 years (and in fact, in my case, it was more like 5). You need to get past the ‘heightened passion’ phase to see if it’s going to last. Marriage is a huge lifetime commitment, and extremely costly and emotionally damaging if it fails. I wouldn’t regard ‘not wanting to get married after a few months of dating’ as commitment phobia. I’d call it sensible.

7

I agree with the above in that pressuring someone for a marriage decision within mere months is bizarre. A couple years, or three, is more like it, and even that is not dragging one’s feet, IMHO.

8

I concur with San Vito above; it would only seem wise to live with a partner for some time before considering marriage. I met my wife when I was 33 - lived together five years, now married for seven. My parents divorced from a loveless marriage so I was wary, but didn’t, thankfully, have a church pressuring us. Only the future in-laws, mildly.

9

It depends on what you think of as “pressure”. I can see having a conversation 4-6 months in about basic facts like 1) do you want to get married someday (in general, not to me) 2) what are your thoughts on children? 3) given your thoughts in 1 and 2, what does a life together like like to you?

If a relationship is moving quicky (and sometimes they do!), its a good idea to make sure you align on those answers. But someone might see that as “pressure”.

10

Here is my big idea marriage:

Marriage is about making a family (whether or not you have kids). Our society and the laws our society developed recognize a huge difference between familial relationships and other relationships. Marriage and adoption are the two ways we legally establish that a non-familial relationship is now a familial one; divorce is how one can break that.

Through that lens, it is not so much about making a committment to the other person as it is informing the rest of the world of the new relationship. And it’s good that we formalize that: I wouldn’t want the law to treat any man I lived with as my family, even if or only if we were fucking: I want to go register somewhere “this person was my very good friend and roommate, but he wasn’t my family, not like my mom is. But now he IS my family, and the law should treat our relationship differently”. That’s helpful.

It’s also helpful in other social ways: I don’t want to call my mom and say “Hey. Up till now, if I’d been in the hospital, I would have wanted you to be the main person who watched over me, talked to the doctors, organized to make sure there was always someone with me but not too many people at once. I would have wanted you to be my thought partner as we talked through treatment options, and if I was unconscious or otherwise unable to make a decision, I would have wanted you to make it. Well, not anymore. From now on, this other person will be my closest person, my next of kin. If my life is in an emergency and I can’t take care of myself, they will be the one telling you when and how long you can come stay. And while I will keep you in the loop and always love to see you, you’re definitely one circle further out when it comes to making decisions or sharing news”. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say to the woman who loves me more than life itself and has done so much for me. Its much easier to just say “Mom! I’m getting married!”.

This same demotion is true for all your relationships when you get married. My sister moved 12 hours away for her husband. She had input into the decision, of course, but at the end of the day, he was the one who wanted to go and she felt the benefit it did him was more significant than the discomfort it would cause her (there were positives for her as well, just on the balance, more negatives).

If she had done that for anyone else, I would never have forgiven her. We are super close, and I loved living in the same city, raising our kids together. It devestated me that she left. But I wasn’t pissed at her, because hey, I fully understand that I am the sister and he is the husband and marriage means “I take other people into account, but this is my family and they get special consideration”. I’d do the same for my husband, and he for me. But if she’d moved for a friend? I would have felt betrayed.

Anyway, thinking of marriage in terms of “publicly and legally expressing a familial relationship” just makes it make sense to me. Ideally, its expressing a shift that has already occured.

11

We don’t have the details from the OP of what the “pressured me for a marriage decision” entailed. That pending, I really don’t think it comprised of general hypotheticals^

Even if the question was presented as a hypothetical, the pressure…err meaning would be clear, as far we are dealing with two people in a romantic relationship.

Personally, I would be astounded to find myself discussing that, and deal with the implications, at mere three months into a relationship. It would definitely reek of desperation on the discussion starter.

The other big hypothetical question, about children, is something that needs to be dealt with some urgency, especially if biological deadlines are fast approaching, but I have never tackled even that just three months into a relationship. Six months, maybe, at the earliest. Even in very fast-moving relationships, where we were discussing moving in together well before three months.

12

I’m also a permanent commitment-phobe, but what strikes me about the way the issue’s been presented is that there’s little to no indication of Wendy’s reaction to the OP’s concerns - if she even knows what they are.

Yes, by all means look for professional help, but at least make sure that Wendy knows what’s going on with you, and spend some time exploring her feelings too.

And, yes, ignore (if you can) what anyone else is telling you to do.

13

You could try owning your issues right up front. Be honest, you have some pretty severe commitment issues you’re struggling to over come. That you have before felt pressure from partner and community which tended to make you withdraw. Be honest, you’d like to change/overcome this. Mostly you need to KNOW you want this because YOU want this. And that while it might mean taking longer, for you to be sure. It would really help if your partner/community could be more patient and wait for you to, ‘get there’, on your own. The pressure you feel, real or imagined, only clouds your thinking, making you more uncertain.

(Elbows, HUGE commitment phobe in long term relationship, 38yrs, with another commitment phobe.)

Good Luck!

14

A few months is usually not enough time for someones true self to come out.

15

I’ve only been with Wendy for a few months, but there’s already marriage pressure; she already asked “what time do you want to get married?” (she framed it as a “in 2023 or in 2024” question and also hinted quite strongly at wanting it in summer 2023.)

One factor is that my relationship with my mother is so bad (long story) that any woman who has any trace of Mom-like behavior triggers heebie-jeebies even if she has good qualities in every other regard. Wendy does have like 30% of my mother’s tendencies and I’m trying to decide if the problem lies with me or with her.

16

Assuming you can’t rewire her or you, the problem is NOT “with her” or “with you”. The problem is with “you two together as a couple”. And as long as you frame this as an effort to determine “who has the problem?”, you’re doomed to bark up the wrong tree of a dead-on-arrival relationship.

Now if your problems with your Mom are such that every woman on Earth displays lots of Mom’s issues (at least as perceived by you), then yes, (at least some of) the problem is you. And if so, you need to either address that through professional help, or expect to be solo for life, or be miserable in any long-term male-female relationship you try.

17

I guess that depends on what these ‘tendencies’ are. Are they simply behaviours that remind you of your mother, good or bad, or are they warning flags about poor behaviour or emotional instability that you don’t wish to revisit.

Either way, I would be clear with Wendy if you’re not thinking about marriage in the near term.

18

I’ve been married forever, but for me it would seem absolutely bizzare to be talking about moving in with someone without knowing if they were in general the marrying kind, or if they preferred serial monogamy or whatever forever. Not because one is better than the other, but because expectations should be aligned.

19

Maybe it’s cultural (most of my girlfriends were first-generation immigrants from China, not Americans) but they would typically ask directly, or hint very strongly, about marriage after mere months. In each case, I think I would have been able to make a much clearer decision had I been given a year or more, but the pressure was cranked up early. I thought it was an aberration with the first or second girlfriend, but now that there’s been a string of such relationships it’s a common denominator.

20

I think that there is an “issue” with your community in that marriage within a short time seems to be assumed. IMHO there seems to be something dysfunctional (or certainly, and significantly, different from anyone I have known) in their thinking.

And I agree with therapy recommendations as well.