Commitmentphobia is often most strongly apparent in romantic life. Generally, commitmentphobic people claim that they are eager to find a lasting romantic attachment and get married, yet they fail to find appropriate partners and maintain longlasting connections. 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.
The key to understanding commitmentphobia is recognizing that such behavior is rooted in fear—fear of lost options or fear of making poor decisions. The commitmentphobic mind sees decisions as permanent, opening the possibility of being caged or trapped forever with no means of escape. Commitmentphobia is a real disabling fear, that can be manifest in many areas of life, including career, home ownership, or even shoe shopping. This fear can make simple every day decisions into a tremendous burden.
To assuage their anxieties, many commitmentphobics 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 or job can ever live up to the fantasy. Commitmentphobics are also prone to self-destructive behavior, such as walking out on partners or jobs without notice, leaving themselves and the people in their lives in untenable situations.
I just started reading Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes last night and now I'm done! What a way to start Christmas vacation! <3
Here are some of the quotable lines from the book. :>
When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side.
LIfe moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
...but something always went wrong, and the relationship would end precisely at the moment when she was sure that this was the person with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life.
Men brought only pain, frustration, suffering and a sense of time dragging.
Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of the people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.
Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life.
I've realized that sometimes you get no second chance and that it's best to accept the gifts the world offers you.
The little experiences of life I've had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no pain wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine.
When it came to seductions, feelings and contracts, one should never play around.
Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.
Her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books.
The only thing that can change someone's mind is love.
The second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.
In the search for happiness, however, we are all equal: none of us is happy.
That's what the world is like: people talk as if they knew everything, but if you dare to ask a question, they don't know anything.
She found herself confronted by the feeling that so often pushes people into making hasty decisions--despair.
The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes.
Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.
