Speed Dating Events

Loving unions are all about giving and taking, making and meeting requests. There are so many small things that each person can ask of and do for the other to make the love grow. For example, Val’s request to be told, at least once a week, that she is breathtakingly beautiful has done wonders for her partnership. Ellen’s request that she be told, at least twice a week, that she is more beautiful than Val has done likewise. And since your partner can’t be expected to read your mind, the premise here is: Ask and ye shall receive.

But hound, and ye shall end up with . . . jack. If you autocratically require your sweetie to do anything, odds are he’ll demur. Again, the principle of reverse desire (what you want, you can’t have) applies, but this time, with a twist: What you demand him to do, he won’t. With a vengeance. With piddling day-to-day conflicts, this dilemma can be resolved by . . . giving up. As someone once said (we think it was Krishnamurti, but maybe it was Bonnie Raitt): Release the desire and it will be yours. If you suck it up (nudge, nudge), bite the bullet (wink, wink), and give him a break, he’ll probably give you one, too.

But suppose your piddling demands become, well, un-piddling. Suppose they escalate way up, from one dinner out a week to, say, marriage. (At this point, we feel obliged to remind you that when it comes to hijackers and terrorists, the greater and more urgent their demands become, the more evident it is to the authorities that they’re completely crackers. If you catch our drift.) You’ve got a bee in your bonnet, and it’s buzzing commitment. You’re obsessed with pinning him down; it’s the fulcrum on which your entire life balances. Danger, danger: Any situation that requires the use of the phrase “your entire life” can often mean big trouble.

Such a fate befell Vicki, and her boyfriend Tim. They’d been going out for three and a half years when they decided to move in together.

“Tim’s lease was up and it seemed like a good idea. For some reason, though, I didn‘t want to live together until we were engaged. I don’t know why I felt that way_; now it seems unnecessary. But I was insecure in the relationship —I was always jealous, asking him a million questions, wanting to know what he did every second of the day. I was convinced that marriage would make me feel more secure. It seemed to me that we had been going out for so long, the next logical thing for us to do was get engaged and then live together. In that order. And I let him know it, again and again.

“He finally proposed when we were on a vacation in Hawaii. Now I realize that being engaged didn‘t mean the same thing to him that it did to me. For me, it was the first step toward the ultimate goal. For him, it was just a ticket to living with me in my apartment. He moved in and everything was fine.

“But then I wanted more. I needed to plan the wedding. My brain was practically chanting, ‘Set a date, set a date.’ It didn‘t help that my mother was calling every day, nagging me to reserve a wedding location. Tim had wanted to keep the whole thing really low-key; he didn‘t want to tell people right away. He kept assuring me that we would one day get married, but he didn‘t want to make a big deal of the engagement. I did. ‘One day’ wasn‘t specific enough for me. I persisted, and finally he relented. We reserved a night at our country club. And I was happy.

“He wasn‘t, though. He wouldn’t help me register or look at furniture. He hated everything I picked. He couldn’t seem to get around to picking ushers. I had always had this picture in my head of what an engagement was supposed to be—and he wasn‘t delivering. I kept at him to participate in my plans. He grew more and more disagreeable. I asked him a thousand times a day what was wrong; he kept insisting that everything was fine.

“Obviously, it wasn‘t. Things started falling apart. We began to make social plans with other people—it was too depressing to be alone together. One weekend, three months before the wedding, I went to visit friends in the Hamptons. When I got back, he told me how much he had missed me. Instead of telling him I’d missed him too, I demanded to know what he had done all weekend, who he’d seen, who he’d talked to. The same old stuff. He started crying and told me that he just couldn’t go on this way. He said he needed to be able to make his own decisions, live his own life. He moved out.”

You can lead a boy to the altar, but you can’t make him say, “I do.” For Vicki, that was a tough lesson to learn. And while she thirsted for marriage, Mary, thirty-three, would have settled for monogamy. She met Rob when she was working as a producer for a local New York television talk show. He was an expert guest. He was cute, witty, and had a big . . . intellect. She thought they were perfect for each other. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I didn‘t know he was seeing someone else until I had already slept with him. He told me that he and Peggy had been together three years—and my heart fell to my knees— but then he said it was almost over. Of course I believed him. He asked if I wanted him to break it off immediately with her for me, and I said no. My first mistake.

“A month later, he still hadn’t ended it. He also hadn’t invited me out to meet his friends or his family, although he kept promising he would. We had a bedroom relationship—not that it was all sex, but that’s just where we spent all our time. I stayed with it because I was still impressed by his credentials, his grasp (literally and figuratively) of the issues, his experience.

“Two months went by, and I assumed that he had finally ended it with Peggy. I asked him how it went, how did she take it. He said he hadn’t broken it off yet. I was shocked. I started feeling like the other woman. I didn‘t like the feeling of being taken advantage of. Our relationship became half passion, half disillusionment. It was so strange, not a normal boyfriend-girlfriend thing, more like some amorphic beast. Still, I was crazy in love with him.

“I focused all my anger on this phantom Peggy. I fixated on her even though I had never met her. She was always there with us, in bed, in my mind. All our problems were about her and his inability to break up with her. I threw tantrums. I cried. I complained. All about her. This made it easier to refuse to commit to me—who wants to pledge devotion to psycho-woman? I grilled him for information about her. I said things like, ‘Why don’t you want me? I’m young and exciting. What’s she got that I don’t have?” He wouldn’t say anything, and that made me angrier. I pressured him constantly. Eventually, it felt like I was just pressuring him to hurt me.”

Love is not a democracy. No matter how hard you campaign, you can’t make him love you, marry you, or commit to you if he doesn’t want to. “Basically,” says Dr. Sills, “if you want to move forward but your partner wants to stay in the same place, you’ve got an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Someone’s got to give in—or it ends.” Your best bet, she says, is to back off for as long as you can and see how the situation develops. But eventually, if he can’t meet your needs, you’ll have to find someone who can. In short:

COMMITMENT LUST

How it works: You demand marriage, monogamy, regular sex, you name it, from a man who cannot, by nature, take orders from anyone and like it. He reacts by . . . not reacting. How it makes you feel: Like you’re beating your head against a brick wall. Your words and sentences start to sound the same. In fact, they are the same. You’ve become a single-track person in a multitrack world. You’re even boring yourself. Overriding emotion: Frustration. No one seems to understand how important this is! Why doesn’t anyone see how important this is? This is important! How you should react: Back off. Remember when the neighborhood kids tried to feed you dirt and you said, “You can’t make me.” The same goes for him. How you do react: You insist on trying to feed him dirt, ten, twenty times a day. Why won’t he eat dirt? Will he ever eat dirt? If so, when? The upside: You learn the difference between “Will you, please?” and “Do it—or else.” You opt for the former. This makes you a more pleasant person. The kind of person that people want to do things for. The kind of person that someone might want to be with . . . for his entire life, even. It’s worth considering.

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