By Sunmola Olowookere
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Alice is puzzled. She does not understand her relationship with James any longer. They have been in a relationship for four years now. She has demonstrated to him in several ways that she was ready for marriage. On his own part too, nothing was stopping him. He has a good job. He has a terrific apartment and already bought a car. Then why is he not ready for deep commitments such as marriage?
This is the dilemma that most young women of marriageable age face. Women find it difficult to understand why most men find it difficult to understand, why men find it difficult committing to a relationship. When it comes to commitment in relationships, men are very elusive. Most of them find committing to a relationship to be as deadly as a death sentence.
On the other hand, women are warm creatures who are ready to give their all to any relationship in order to make it work. Hence, it’s a painful experience to be deeply connected with a man, only to find him pulling away and losing interest at a time when the woman thought that their bond was too strong to be broken.
Have you ever being with a man who seemed to really like you, only to begin distancing himself and saying he really wasn’t ready for a commitment? Some men break out in cold sweat when they hear their lady-love talk about having babies and building a home together.
At a point, this kind of men tend to break up with their girlfriends when they can no longer handle the coziness of a steady relationship. It is a well-known fact that breakups are mostly hard for women to handle as they would feel that inadequacies on their part had made the man to walk away.
However when he ends ties the knot with the next woman that comes along, the question that would be uppermost in the mind of the hurt woman would be “Why is it that he ends up marrying the next woman he dates? Was he lying when he said he wasn’t ready for a commitment?” The answer comes down to deep emotional attraction.
In all likelihood, he may not be lying when he said he wasn’t ready for a commitment. In fact, unlike women, a man’s default mode is that he is not ready for (or even looking for) a commitment. It takes a special kind of deep emotional attraction for a man to feel compelled to keep a woman in his life with a shared promise of committed intentions for the future. What creates that intense emotional bond for men? I can tell you one thing for certain.
Men experience relationships for what they are here and now, that is, in the present moment. This is a stereotype, but because there is so much truth in it, you would be foolish to ignore its implications for your relationship.
Research with men and women in the early stages of dating relationships has shown that women typically consider themselves to be “in a relationship” by the time the third date rolls around.
In contrast, men do not consider themselves to be “in a relationship” until several months of exclusive dating have occurred. Even when he’s exclusively dating one woman, a man will be surprised when his counterpart suggests the relationship is exclusive. Why is that?
Again, it comes back to the fact that men tend to spend less time plotting and planning the course of their lives in terms of relationships as women do. Men do not define their lives (as much) by where things seem to be going in a relationship.
For your man to reach a point where he desires a committed relationship, something very significant must occur first. He must experience an intense emotional attraction that causes him to feel less alive when he is not in your presence.
