Since Valentine's Day is coming up this week, I thought I'd revisit an old column on commitment. The clients in this story are not real people, but rather fictional characters I'm using to tell a story. Commitment is a painful process for many people. Perhaps this story will shed some light on the situation of someone you know.
-- Dr. Marie

Mike and Anna came in with a complaint I see often these days. They have been living together for eight years and have known each other for ten. He is 38; she is 33. She is beginning to think about having children and wants to get married. He doesn't see why they should marry and is happy the way things are. She accuses him of being afraid of commitment. He resents that she is pushing him. They've never had serious fights before and worry that this issue is going to blow them apart. What to do.

The "C" word. Commitment. Both of these people have managed to avoid it in their relationship well into their 30's. What is going on here?

It may help to look at what commitment really means to each of them; not what they say it means, but what they fear. A general principle is that when people are this stuck and can't figure out a solution in spite of their own intelligence, creativity, and caring for one another, there is some unnamed fear lurking in the background.

Discussion with Anna revealed that her Dad had been a violent alcoholic who had beaten her mother and then divorced her when Anna was 7. Mother became so depressed she couldn't take care of her children. Anna and her brother then went to live with Dad who was constantly angry about the situation and who generally ignored the kids. Mother reclaimed the children when Anna was 9 and married a man who couldn't stand children's noise and who retreated to his photo lab after dinner each night, thus depriving the children of a second chance at having a Dad.

Mike, on the other hand, was raised by a single mother who was simply overwhelmed by the task of making a living and raising him and his two older siblings. Although it was clear that she loved him very much, she was often exhausted and relied on the older kids to take care of many of his needs. He hasn't seen his father since he was two and says he doesn't want to.

Both Anna and Mike come to their relationship as hurt people. Since neither had a model for a healthy relationship, neither one of them has an internal compass for how an adult relationship between a man and a woman works. Neither of them got enough love and attention from an opposite sex parent to feel confident in their ability to give and receive love from a person of the opposite sex. Neither of them, though for different reasons, had an experience during their formative years that the person who is supposed to love them the most will stick by them and give them what they need.

I tell Mike and Anna that I call couples like this "pioneers". They have an image of what they want in life but going for it is a major step into the unknown. They deserve enormous credit for even beginning the trip. However, they have had such little training for a successful committed relationship that they hedge their bets. It's as if each is saying, "Yes, I'll go with you but when the going gets rough, I'll get going. I've been hurt enough already."

It's not by accident that these people found each other. Intuitively, each knew that they had found a kindred spirit. Skittish about attaching, each found someone as prickly about it as themselves. From the outside, Mike can look like the "bad guy" for not wanting to get married. But the fact is that Anna has also participated in a relationship that has gone on for 10 years at a very carefully calibrated level of closeness. It is probably the external reality that women can't have children past a certain age that is pushing her to make the first move now.

It's still amazing to me how much can change when a problem is redefined in a way that it sympathetic to each person's pain and that gives partners a new way to understand each other. Although each of these people had known the facts of the other's background, they had not understood the implications.

We talked about what each thought they needed to do to help the other feel that they could be relied upon and that they would not abandon the relationship. Not atypically, each thought of him/herself as absolutely reliable. Each had made a vow that they would never be like the abandoning parent. That's why the relationship had endured for a decade. But neither really trusted the other to reciprocate.

Each was able to air their fears and to talk about what they needed to feel reassured. Anna said she needed more physical affection and closeness to feel safer in the relationship. Mike needed her to do more little things for him to show him that she really knew him. Expressed in the context of their fears and unmet childhood needs, each could hear these suggestions as requests instead of unreasonable demands. We developed some homework assignments to help them get started.

Not all couples who are having trouble making the public commitment of marriage are like Anna and Mike, of course. But often enough when a couple has been able to love and enjoy each other for a number of years but not marry, it reflects a fear of being vulnerable to another person that is grounded in some old pain.

Dr. Marie advises:

To transform a good relationship into a committed one . . .

• Take a look at your own family history and figure out how your current situation makes a kind of sense.

• Reach for the fear. Figure out what you are each afraid of. Find ways to comfort and reassure each other.