Why You Are Afraid of Commitment

Actress Anna Akana recently shared a video where she reflected on the time when she was a kid and saw her mom crying after shaving off her hair and getting drunk. She was overwhelmed due to raising three kids and Anna’s father being abroad in the military.

Through tears, she told Anna to never have children and to focus on a career.

It seems that Anna subconsciously bought into this “advice” or warning. She certainly has a career but she also seems to attract people who reflect her subconscious fear of commitment, a point she had known for some time as this wasn’t the first time she had addressed it.

I learnt this lesson as a kid when I watched my mother utterly frustrated with me but referencing my father instead of anything I did.

There was even a time when she very calmly spoke about their relationship and then descended into an emotional rhetoric that firmly planted in my mind the importance and necessity of being with the right person.

I learnt to approach romance and love with fear.

I’ve liked girls for as long as I can remember. When the boys and girls found each other gross, I never understood it. I felt like a trendsetter, already living in the future and knowing that everybody else would eventually catch up.

I assumed I’d marry early and to my high school sweetheart. If that didn’t happen then I’d at least marry by thirty like my parents did.

But now I’m thirty-one with a number of women that I’ve come to love but at one point or another have reflected the same message: they cannot commit.

Like Anna, my subconscious is running the show. So despite my conscious desire to commit and to be with someone who will commit, I rarely if ever get the opportunity. And when I get it, which again is rare, I have a justification as to why the relationship wouldn’t make sense.

But once I figure out the deeper reason I was afraid to be with that specific person, it’s too late. They are now commitment-phobic or are pursuing someone who is commitment-phobic.

It’s like there’s a commitment-phobe league and we all just date each other until we hopefully level up and into commitment league.

So what can we do about it? Akana made a list of three things that I totally endorse:

1. Therapy,

2. Observing your relationship patterns and then applying those lessons into future romantic endeavors, and

3. Talking with friends about the patterns they’ve seen in your dating life and actually taking the advice.

I’ll add a fourth thing to the list. Psychology Today has a Fear of Relationship Commitment test that you can take for free and get a result on how afraid of or devoted to commitment you are (but you have to pay $6.95 for the full results).

The questions themselves give you an insight on the things in a relationship that are no sweat and the things that are yes sweat.

The fifth and final thing I’ll add to the list is to do what Anna did and reflect on your past. When was the first time you felt that committing to something was either a bad idea or it resulted in pain? When did you learn that committing was not as beneficial as non-committing or committing when everything was perfect?

Damn near everyone in the comments section quoted this line and it’d be remiss if I didn’t:

“You’re addicted to emotional chaos and your subconscious is trying to right the wrongs of your past by seeking out similar dynamics and rewriting history.”

Deep down you know that your lack of commitment is a problem, otherwise you wouldn’t even be thinking that it is a problem. This is why you try to solve that wound or negative belief within yourself by dating people who reflect the same wound or negative belief.

It isn’t that people just don’t want to commit these days. You are a part of it too. Maybe you aren’t as bad, sure. But you also carry the trait.

By embracing the past that wounded you and/or replacing the negative belief with a positive one, you can leave the league of commitment-phobes and join the league of love and commitment.

Because at the end of the day, you either change in order for your life to change, or you remain the same and continue to experience more of the same.

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Previously published on medium

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