LOVE: COMMITMENT ANXIETY

There is no such thing as perfection. If you try to be perfect, you will never enjoy the process of what you are doing because your fear you will not live up to your expectation. No matter how well you do something, you always feel like a failure because you not lived up to your own impossible goals. It creates a feeling of constant insecurity because you are never good enough. Your outer self bets up on your inner self.

Pleasure of intimacy is often consciously and unconsciously thwarted by fear that may cause us to back away from the very thing we desire. Anxiety is a signal that you are anticipating something bad happening in the future. Often, it appears as if out of nowhere, descending and foreboding. You find yourself closing in and withdrawing. Your child mind might say: " I don't love myself so there must be something wrong with you if you want to be close to me." In this scenario, you are being self-critical, and you expect anyone who cares about you to be the same if they really get to know you. Of course, criticizing yourself is bad enough, but when you imagine the person you are attracted to joining in the bashing, it can be overwhelming.

The anxiety represents a conflict between desire and fear. Your inner and outer self are battling it out. One part of you says, "My partner is wonderful and sexy, I am excited I can't wait to go to be with them. " Another part says, " He is just after sex', or "How many lovers has he had in the past? or "You're going to get hurt."

It can be difficult to tell the difference between control and and caring. For the person trying to stop controlling, it involves giving up perfectionist expectations, expecting your partner to do thins the way you do. For the person being controlled, it involves giving up having to please and facing the fear of being responsible. it requires being aware of the difference between the anxious, heavy feeling of being dependent and the light loving security of inter dependence. 

As you get to know a person as someone you really enjoy being with, commitment becomes more and more of an issue. Unless you make conscious decision that balance your needs with thost of your lover, you may start to fee trapped because you invest more and more of your time and energy in the relationship, and attend less and less to yourself as an independent entity. This is a reality you must face as you think of giving up dating other people. It is, in fact, true: there is always someone out there who si smarter, more attractive, wealthier, funnier, more lively, or may possess any number of more appealing characteristics than the person to whom you have made a commitment. You can spend the rest of your life looking for them and still end up alone---and lonely.

So much of our life is spent looking for the right person to love us that we feel at a loose end when the search is over. There is a sense of loss-- the high and lows of the search itself is missing. Now that you've found that person who really matches your expectations, the excitement that came from desiring something in the future is not longer there. It that is true for you, you have not learned how to enjoy life in this moment--the only moment in which you can truly be alive. You have returned to being what the Buddhist describe as a hungry ghost. your mind is else where, leaving your body as a corpse. You do not feel excited, you many realize, to be with your lover. In such a cases, your responses to your lover's ardent expression of love sound hollow, even to you. Sex may revive things for a while, but that too loses luster. Guilt creeps in. You start distance yourself. Like a dog locked in a run, you want to jump the fence and sniff out there possibilities.


It's natural for you to want to do your part with attractive people who come your way. Making a commitment to be with one person requires a heart-felt decision that goes against the grain of your inner adolescent--but the reward in the currency of love are beyond measure. Loving each other exclusively is a big leap step forward and a necessary one to give deep intimacy a chance. When you have an urge to stray, remember your commitment not to anything that will hurt your partner. The guilt, insecurity, and jealousy it will produce are hardly worth any transient pleasure you might obtain. When you do feel an emotional tug toward someone else, it's okay to enjoy your excitement, then stop and love yourself for not following through with the impulse.