Are You In Love With Someone Who Won’t Commit?

Have you ever fallen in love with someone with commitment phobia?  Often I talk about how important it is to look for the deeper meaning in life but if someone tells you outright that they just can’t commit, I would suggest that you make sure you pay attention.  If you only want a casual and even non-exclusive relationship, then you’ve found your match, but if you’re carrying on with them in the hope that they’ll change, you’re likely to get hurt.

Spiritually, our relationships mirror our internal world.  So if you find that you are falling for someone who is a confessed commitment phobe, what could it possibly be revealing about you?  Here are some points to ponder.

1/Do you love you and think that you are worthy of love? If we feel that we don’t deserve to be loved for any reason we can allow ourselves to become involved with people who just can’t love us in the way we need.  Commitment phobes aren’t out to hurt us deliberately.  They are just being who they are.  Delve into why you don’t feel as though you deserve more.

2/Does the feeling of being in love with a commitment phobe remind you of anything?  Experiences from our past can mean that we can mistake pain, longing and all sorts of other things that aren’t love for love.  Cathy’s father left when she was just a toddler and she never saw him again.  She can still remember crying herself to sleep when he went.  As an adult, every time she meets someone who seems to be pulling away, it evokes that same feeling of loss and she thinks it must be love.

3/Does it mask your own lack of ability to commit?  Sometimes we can match up with someone with exactly the same issues as us in a way that allows us to use their stuff as a smokescreen for what we aren’t yet ready to deal with in ourselves.  If you struggle with commitment, getting involved with someone who is as jumpy as a rabbit hearing a farmer’s dog will provide you with lots of external diversions that keep you from looking inside.

4/Have you fallen into the shadow of the wounded healer?  Very common on the spiritual path, those of us with natural healing abilities and tendencies find ourselves in intimate relationships with all sorts of lost and damaged souls in the belief that this is how we answer our soul’s calling and express our gifts.  Listen carefully for you saying or thinking, ‘but I can help him/her’, or find yourself endlessly delving into what is creating their inability to commit in the hope that you’ll heal them and they’ll change and be so grateful they’ll stay with you forever.   There’s a reason why doctors or therapists aren’t supposed to date patients.  People in healthy relationships support each other, but one doesn’t make the other person their project.

5/Have you got unconditional love confused with being walked over?  Again, this is very common on the spiritual path.  They say, I like you and I also need to see other people, and we say, that’s fine, I love you unconditionally.  And then we go home and eat a box of chocolates and cry ourselves to sleep.  Everyone has their own unique moral compass and these days we have a great deal more freedom in defining and the relationships that are right for us, be they monogamous, polygamous or polyamory, but we do have to be true to what is right for us.  It’s not being true, authentic or honest to say that something is okay when it devastates us.  You can love someone unconditionally from a distance.

People can and do change.  The paradox is, people are most likely to change when we don’t need them to.   Some commitment phobes stay like that forever.  These are the Peter Pans, Puer Aeternus or Puella Aeterna  of the cosmos; men and women who are emotional children, unable to grow up.  We love them because they do carry the magic of enchantment with them.  But if we get too close, too involved, we can be terribly hurt.  Loving them unconditionally, from whatever emotional distance that is safe for us, means that we can appreciate the radiance that they do bring to the world without being burned by it.

Loads of love,

Michele x