Why Won't Anyone Commit?

When I was a therapist, I used to sit with a lot of people over the years. And one of the threads that seemed to be more prolific, especially in the later years, were people that were very scared to commit to the word relationship. And a lot of these people had been seeing someone for a few months, and they would maybe share a bed a few nights a week. And maybe a small shared calendar for things that they would do together.

And they had little private jokes that make two people feel like a thing. But they still never wanted to define what their thing was. And neither person would ask because asking is actually the dangerous part. And they would say things like we're being easy going, we're keeping in light, we're not rushing into anything too quickly. But what they're actually doing every day is watching one number, whether the other person cared more than they do, and making sure that their level of care never showed.

Now, every one of those people wanted to be loved, and they're not necessarily proud of being hard to reach. But almost every one of these people learned somewhere in the past that the moment you say, I'd like this to be real, you've handed the other person a knife and turned your back. So people hover one foot near the door and you call it being chill. Now, people are not naturally cynical, whatever the headlines say about people your age.

Most people are frightened and they've gotten very organized about it. And so they keep things undefined the way someone keeps an exit clean. And the exhausting truth is that people are doing all of this in order to be close to someone while running the exact strategy that guarantees they never will be. Now, if this is you, you probably have words for this already. Maybe you're anxious, maybe they've got a fearful, avoidant thing going on.

And the whole conversation has collapsed into attachment styles. And once you've sorted everyone into their boxes, you feel like you understand what's happening. And there's something really in there, but watch what the whole industry around it does with that little grain of truth, all the dating coaches and the attachment style quizzes, the endless content. They were never built to get you into a real relationship. They were built to keep you engaged and scrolling and taking another assessment and another test.

And a person who feels understood is a person who keeps consuming the thing that understood them. So they hand you a label instead of a truth. And the label turns a frightened person into a category and a relationship that didn't work into a diagnosis that you can recite to your friends at brunch. And it explains everything and changes nothing, which is exactly what makes it so marketable. You could know your attachment style down to the minutiae and still wake up next to someone you can't reach because naming the pattern was never the same as being willing to stop running it.

What's actually happening to a whole cohort of people at once is that an inherited belief that's been installed in you pretending to be wisdom has a type of belief that safety means withholding, that the way to be secure with another person is to give less of yourself, to say less, to want less out loud, and keep everything real to yourself. And we're built a culture that treats vulnerability as a vulnerability in the security sense and calls it an exposed surface, a way you can be attacked.

And if that's your starting belief, the rational move is to reduce your exposure. And so you go into intimacy the way you go into a negotiation where the other side might be lying. And in that, you reveal as little as possible, commit to nothing you can't walk back from and keep your real needs and wants to the side where they can't be used against you. But hold that belief up to the light for a moment because withholding isn't safety, withholding is distance, and distance isn't protection.

It's just loneliness that you choose on purpose. So this strategy is perfect for exactly one thing and a catastrophe for the thing you actually came for. Closeness doesn't survive the removal of risk. Closeness is the risk, and that's the substance of it. If you've ever stayed in a partnership that you didn't want to label as a partnership for months, sharing a bed and a calendar with someone you still couldn't call your partner, here's what's really going on.

When you organise your love life around not getting hurt, you don't end up safe. You end up alone with more sophistication around that. With all the loneliness of being uncommitted and none of the freedom because you're not actually free, you're guarding something every minute. And the joke is that the wound you were protecting against, the one where you cared and it wasn't returned, is the exact wound you hand yourself slowly by never letting anyone close enough to matter in the first place.

So it's important to see now why a whole generation arrived here together because it isn't a coincidence and it's also not a moral failing. You came of age inside systems that taught you efficiently to treat connection as a marketplace. The apps turned other people into a feed you swipe and endless supply that trained you without ever saying so to keep one eye on the door because there's always another option, a thumb flick away.

The wider culture handed you the language of self-protection and made caution sound like wisdom. And many of you watched the closest relationships in your own childhoods come apart and concluded that love is the thing that breaks you. So the smart move is to never quite hand anyone the power to break you. Now none of that is fundamentally irrational. Every piece of it makes sense as a response to what you were shown. But a thousand sensible little acts of self-protection add up over years to a person who's become good at not being reached and has forgotten that being reached was the entire point.

So look at how you actually walk in. A lot of people approach relationships as a way to get a feeling they're missing for a sense of belonging to be chosen made to feel like they're enough. And that posture, however understandable, is exactly what produces the hovering and the hedging and the avoidance. Because if you're relating from lack, the other person is a supply of something you need. And a supply can be cut off.

So of course you protect yourself. Of course you keep it undefined. You're not in a relationship, you're managing a source. When you walk into dating with an emptiness inside you, scanning the other person for whether they'll finally make you feel wanted, you can't build anything real because you're using them to feel real yourself. The hunger you bring in becomes the thing you have to defend. And defending it is exactly what keeps you at arm's length from the closeness that might have actually fed you.

Two people texting for months, each waiting for the other to go first, each terrified of being the one who reached. That's not intimacy. That's two people negotiating over who has to be brave. And the way out isn't a technique and it's not learning how to communicate your needs better, though that wouldn't hurt sometimes. It's actually coming to the table already standing on your own feet, becoming over time someone who'd be all right, even if this particular person turned out to be wrong.

All right, while still caring deeply because you're okay, was never sub-contracted out to them. When you're not relating from a whole the other person has to feel, something opens up, you can finally afford to be seen. You can say the true thing. You can want the relationship out loud because being wrong about it would be a sorrow but not an annihilation. The capacity to be vulnerable doesn't come from being braver about exposure.

It comes from having somewhere solid to stand so that exposure stops feeling like a ledge or the edge of a cliff. So to anyone stuck in the situation ship that won't resolve, the thing that's almost a relationship but never quite gets called that, I'd say this, the problem probably was never that you keep picking avoidant people or that you're too anxious or the dating apps are broken, even though all of that might be true.

The deeper thing is that two people bringing half of themselves each protecting an old wound will negotiate forever and never land anywhere together. The way out isn't to find someone safe enough that you can finally lower your guard. It's to become whole enough that you don't even need the guard in the first place so you can love someone for who they actually are instead of what they might fix in you. So picture it again, you and someone else four months in being both certain that reaching first is how you get hurt.

One of you could put the guard down. What changed was not finding someone safe enough. It was finally having somewhere to stand that the other person wasn't holding up. The knife you've been so careful not to hand over was never in their hands in the first place. You've been pressing it against yourself this whole time and calling that being careful just because the knife wasn't in someone else's hands. If anything in this episode made you want to explore what you just heard I've made it very easy for you to do so.

In the show notes there's a link to access a book called Before Approaching the Threshold which is the gateway into this work. Alongside this you'll also receive 14 days of free access to the Atlas and intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work and it's there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with. Both are free to start and the link to access them is in the show notes.

This was Michael Loria and you're listening to the Architect Speaks.