Fear of commitment: when closeness is both a wish and a threat

“Everything is fine. Really. We have a good time, we don’t argue, my friends like her. But when she said last week that we could start looking for a flat together in the autumn, I slept badly for three nights. And then I caught myself wondering whether her laugh isn’t a bit too loud.”

A description like this is common, and it almost always comes with confusion. The person knows they love the other. They also know they have no real reason to leave. And yet, the moment the relationship takes a step forward, something in them tightens — and the mind obligingly starts looking for faults. In this post I would like to explain what is happening at such moments, why it is not the same as “doesn’t care enough”, and how to tell a fear that is old from a doubt that is telling you something about this relationship.

One thing in advance: commitment is not a duty and being single is not a fault to be fixed. This post is not meant to talk anyone into a relationship. It is meant for those who want closeness and are frightened of it at the same time.

What we mean by fear of commitment

Fear of commitment is not a diagnosis. You will not find it as a disorder in any manual, and the term “commitment phobia” that circulates online is popular, not clinical. The name describes a pattern: a person wants a relationship, but at the steps that make it firmer — exclusivity, meeting the family, a shared home, marriage, a child — strong resistance, restlessness or a need to withdraw is set off in them.

The key word is wants. Someone who simply does not want a relationship or a marriage, and is at peace with that, does not have a fear of commitment. They have a preference. Fear is recognisable by the split: by the fact that you move towards something and resist it at the same time, and that this costs you.

One of the first studies of adult romantic relationships gives a hint of how common discomfort with closeness is. In 1987 Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver offered newspaper readers three short descriptions and asked them to choose the one that fitted them best. Roughly a quarter recognised themselves in the description of being uncomfortable with closeness, finding it hard to trust, and often having partners who want more intimacy than feels comfortable. The sample was not representative, and discomfort with closeness is not the same as fear of commitment. But it does say that this is an experience that is anything but rare.

Desire and alarm at once

The hardest part of this fear is that it does not run in one direction. If it did, things would be simple: you would not want to, and you would not go. In fear of commitment, two forces act at once. One pulls you towards the person — you miss them, you would like to be truly known, you picture a life together. The other pulls you away — plans bring a tightness in the chest, you need distance, you suddenly see everything that is not perfect.

This state, in which you feel two opposite things about the same matter, is called ambivalence. In itself it is not a sign that anything is wrong; we are at least a little ambivalent about everything that matters in life. The difficulty arises when you can no longer move between the two forces, and every step towards closeness triggers an equally strong step back.

This circle explains why fear of commitment often looks, from the outside, like indecision or even like game-playing. From the inside it is neither. It is an attempt to obey two voices at once that want opposite things.

Where it comes from: what we learned about closeness

The best-researched framework for understanding this pattern is attachment theory. I have written about its foundations in Attachment styles: the four patterns we learn closeness by, and how to spot your own, so here I will keep to what is essential for fear of commitment.

In 1991 Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz showed that avoiding closeness is not one single thing. They described two versions. In the first, the person dismisses closeness: they are convinced they do not need it and stake everything on self-reliance. That version has a post of its own, Avoidant attachment: why closeness tires and retreat calms, where the mechanism of withdrawal is described in detail and I will not repeat it here; there is also a short summary in the knowledge base under avoidant attachment.

In the second version, which they called fearful, the person wants closeness and is afraid of it at the same time — afraid of being rejected or hurt if they truly open up. This is the form for which the title of this post fits best: closeness is both a wish and a threat. When, in childhood, the same person was the source of comfort and the source of fear, this split can run very deep; that is the subject of Disorganised attachment: when the same person is both comfort and fear.

Relational family therapy, in which I am training, adds a further layer. Early relationships are recorded not only as memories but as an atmosphere — a bodily sense of what closeness brings with it. If closeness once meant having to look after an adult’s feelings, having no space of your own, being overwhelmed or being left alone at exactly the moment you needed something, then the body does not read commitment as safety. It reads it as a return to something familiar and tight. That is why the fear is often not a fear of this person, but of what closeness meant the first time round.

Some caution is needed here. The links between early attachment and adult relationships are real in the research, but moderate. Childhood is not a verdict, and not everyone who fears commitment has a hard story behind them. Sometimes one painful break-up is enough, or a parental divorce watched at close range.

How it shows up day to day

Fear of commitment rarely introduces itself by name. It usually dresses up as something more reasonable. Some of the forms people describe:

• Faults that appear right on time. For months everything is fine, but once things get serious you start being bothered by how they eat, how they dress, what they read. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver call such moves deactivating strategies: ways of silencing the need for closeness when it grows too loud.
• An open door. The app you have not deleted, the ex you still message, the thought that somewhere there is someone who would be “more right”.
• Fog about the future. “We’ll see.” “Why do we have to label everything?” The present is pleasant; the future tense is unusable.
• Withdrawal after closeness. After a lovely weekend, after a conversation in which you opened up, after saying “I love you”, a few days of coolness or irritability follow.
• Choosing the unavailable. People who are taken, far away or not ready themselves. With them longing is safe, because commitment cannot happen.
• The body. Tightness in the chest, poor sleep, a feeling of being trapped that arrives with a move, an engagement or the signing of a contract and is hard to explain.

None of these on its own means fear of commitment. Faults can be real, and fog is sometimes honest uncertainty. It becomes telling when the same sequence repeats with different people.

The one who waits may be torn too

In stories about fear of commitment the roles are usually divided: one runs, the other waits. The truth is often less tidy. In 2011 Samantha Joel and her colleagues showed that people with more anxious attachment — those who seek closeness most loudly — are also torn about commitment. A strong need for the relationship draws them towards it, while doubt about whether they can really rely on their partner holds them back.

This matters for two reasons. First, the person pressing for commitment may themselves be avoiding the question of whether they truly want it, as long as the other is the one who hesitates. Second, a couple can get caught in a dance in which one pursues and the other flees, while both are afraid of the same thing. I described that dance in The anxious and the avoidant partner: why these two find each other, and how to leave the loop.

Commitment is a decision, not only a feeling

People often wait to feel commitment — for the doubt to vanish and for things to be clear. The relationship researcher Scott Stanley offers a more useful view. Back in 1992, with Howard Markman, he distinguished two kinds of commitment. The first is dedication: the wish for the relationship to last and the willingness to give something for it. The second is the constraints that make leaving harder — a shared flat, a mortgage, family expectations, a dog.

Later, with colleagues, he described the difference between sliding into the next stage and deciding on it. A couple who move in together because it is cheaper and one of them was there every evening anyway accumulate constraints without ever really asking themselves about dedication. Stanley calls this inertia: the more two lives are intertwined, the harder it is to leave, even if the relationship is not a good one.

For someone who fears commitment there are two messages in this. The first is a relief: commitment does not require you to feel no doubt. It requires a decision that you make alongside the doubt and then keep making. The second is a warning: fear is sometimes sidestepped precisely by sliding. A person who cannot say “I have chosen you” may find themselves in a shared flat because “it just worked out that way” — and the feeling of being trapped that they feared acquires a real basis. In Slovenia this is especially close to home, because sharing a flat is often a financial necessity as well as an emotional step.

How it sounds between two people

A conversation in a couple might go something like this (composed, not a real person):

“Why did you go quiet when I mentioned the flat?”
“I didn’t go quiet. I just … don’t know why everything has to be decided now.”
“We’ve been together three years.”
“I know. And I don’t want you to leave. But when you say that, I feel as if something is closing.”
“What’s closing?”
“I don’t know. Me, maybe.”
“That’s the first time you’ve told me anything other than ‘we’ll see’.”

The last line says something essential. What wounds the partner who waits is not usually the fear itself. It is the fog — not knowing what they are dealing with, and reading the blank as “doesn’t love me enough”. The sentence “I’m scared and I don’t know exactly of what” is uncomfortable, but it is the first one that can be answered.

An exercise: what exactly am I afraid of

The word “commitment” is too large to be feared precisely. This exercise takes it apart. Take a sheet of paper and twenty minutes; do it on your own before you talk about it with your partner.

1. Write down the concrete step. Not “commitment”, but what is actually in front of you: “moving in together”, “saying that we are a couple”, “meeting her parents”.
2. Finish the sentence five times. “If I do this, I’m afraid that …” Write quickly, without correcting. The first answers will be reasonable (“that it won’t work”), the later ones often truer (“that I’ll have nowhere left to go”, “that I’ll turn into my father”).
3. For each answer ask: how long have I known this? Did this fear arise with this person, or do you know it from before — from earlier relationships, from home?
4. Write the other side too. “If I don’t do this, I will lose …” Ambivalence has two sides and both deserve a line.
5. Choose one sentence you can say out loud. Not a decision — just a sentence. For example: “When we talk about the flat I tense up, and I think it has little to do with you.” It takes some vulnerability, but it gives the other person something fog cannot: information.

The exercise will not decide for you. But it can turn one large, shapeless fear into two or three smaller ones that can be talked about.

Where this explanation does not apply

So far I have written as though resistance to commitment were a fear to be understood and, in time, overcome. That is not always true, and sometimes such an explanation is actually harmful.

Doubt can be information. Sometimes the body is not reacting to closeness in general, but to this relationship. If you often feel smaller around someone, if you differ on something fundamental, if the doubt remains even when nobody is pressing, that is not a pattern to be “worked through”. It is a message.

When there is fear of the partner, the attachment explanation falls away. If you are afraid of their outbursts, if they control your money, phone or contacts, if you have already experienced violence, then resistance to a closer bond is not your problem with closeness. It is sound judgement. In Slovenia you can talk about this on the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence, 080 11 55; if you are in danger, call the police on 113 or the emergency number 112.

Not wanting is legitimate. Some people do not want marriage, a shared household or children, and are at peace with that. The label “afraid of commitment” is handy because it turns a different wish into a defect, and in an argument it quickly becomes a weapon. If you use it about your partner, ask yourself whether you are describing their fear or your own distress at wanting different things.

The opposite fear has a cost too. In 2013 Stephanie Spielmann and her colleagues showed that people who are more afraid of being single are more likely to stay in relationships they are not satisfied with and to settle for less than they want. Commitment out of fear of being alone is no more mature than withdrawal out of fear of closeness. The pressure from those around us that feeds this fear is the subject of Single in your thirties and beyond: a pressure that isn’t yours.

And sometimes it really is just too soon. After a recent break-up, in the middle of a major change, or at twenty-three, resistance to final decisions is not a symptom. It is a sense of timing.

What helps in the longer run

The good news from attachment research is that patterns are not set in concrete. People who started out with insecure attachment can develop a more secure one in adulthood — through a relationship that holds, through reflecting on their own story, often through therapy too. I have gathered what we know about this in Secure attachment can be learned: what the research says about earned security in adulthood.

In real life the shift rarely happens in one great leap. It happens in small steps in which you stay a little longer than you otherwise would: you reply after three hours rather than three days; you say that you tensed up instead of going cold; you tolerate a plan two months ahead. Each time closeness does not end the way the body expected, the alarm becomes a little quieter.

Many people who fear commitment are really afraid of disappearing in a relationship. For them it is helpful to consider that closeness and independence are not opposites. The capacity to be close and remain yourself is called differentiation, and there is more about it in Differentiation: how to stay yourself and stay in the relationship.

If the same circle keeps repeating and you cannot stop it on your own, therapy makes sense — alone or as a couple. As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I work in person in Ljubljana, including with English-speaking clients. Some people find it helps to see the pattern drawn out first: in the longer session A Look into the Past we put together a genogram and look at how your family, across generations, has handled closeness, departures and commitments. The aim is not to find someone to blame. The aim is for the fear to acquire a story — and so become something you can decide about, rather than something that decides for you.

What to remember

• Fear of commitment is not a diagnosis and not a lack of love; it is a split in which you want closeness and fear it at the same time.
• Pulling back brings relief but not peace — which is why the circle repeats.
• Commitment does not require the absence of doubt. It is a decision you make alongside doubt; the real risk is sliding without deciding.
• Resistance is not always fear: it can be a message about this relationship, a different wish, or sound judgement when you are afraid of your partner.
• Fog wounds more than fear does. One honest sentence about what is going on in you is often the first step.