Mark was totally, completely, 100 percent commitment-free. He was the Ivory Soap of men. He didn’t have a wife, a fiance or a girlfriend. No children. No pets. Not even a plant. He didn’t have a mortgage or a car payment. No outstanding debts. He didn’t buy on time. He paid off his credit cards. It wasn’t an accident.
“Mark told me he was so committed to not being committed that he had turned down a great deal when his apartment went condo,” says Pam. “Mark was free as the breeze.”
That appealed to Pam. Her last boyfriend, Al, had been committed way over his head. He was slowly, tortuously paying off his medical school loans. He was paying child support and had two mortgages.
Pam met Mark on the job. He was a sales associate. He did a lot of traveling, but you’d figure that, right? She was a corporate assistant vice president.
“Mark was funny, cute and needy,” says Pam. “He grew dependent on me quickly, despite his claims of not needing anyone or anything, and I played right into it. I started washing and ironing his shirts within a month of meeting him. I made him dinner two nights a week.”
In return for all this nurturing, mothering and smothering, Mark told Pam he loved her. Well, at least he loved her as much as a commitment-phobe could love. He told her he had shied away from steady relationships before, but that he was feeling something different now.
Pam sincerely believed that different thing he was feeling was something other than a warm meal in his belly and a fresh shirt on his back.
They had long talks about his childhood to get to the root of his fear of settling down, with the hope, on Pam’s part, that if they found what caused it, they could cure it.
“He was afraid to commit because his parents’ relationship had been up and down and finally ended in divorce.”
Even though he was falling for Pam, Mark still drove with a “Say No to Commitment” bumper sticker.
“Any time he said he loved me, he said it in the context of how weird it was to feel this way, given his history, yada, yada, yada.”
After they’d been together six months, Pam found out that Mark had a post office box at a mailbox store. She wasn’t too worried at first.
“It seemed like part of his deal,” she says. “A rolling stone needs a post office box.”
Then she found out he had a voice mail number.
Do rolling stones need those too?
The more she found out, the more uneasy she started to feel.
Finally, a friend told a friend who told Pam about the real Mark.
It was true he was phobic about commitments. So phobic he hadn’t bothered to tell his last girlfriend when he was out of their relationship. If he actually was. She lived in New York, where Mark traveled on business, and she assumed she was still involved in a real-live long-distance romance.
When Pam confronted Mark, he spilled. He still spoke with his ex(?) girlfriend once a week. He had seen her about once every two months since he had been with Pam. He didn’t know what or whom he wanted. He was afraid to commit to either of them, that’s why it was so convenient to keep them both.
“The sad thing is, Mark was true to himself. He told me who he was–someone who was unable to commit–and I didn’t listen. I let myself believe I was his healer and reformer. Now I know for sure what I should have known all along: You can never change anyone.”
There’s another thing you can never do: You can never get anyone to confront themselves. Mark’s not a commitment-phobe, he’s just a liar.
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What were you thinking when you walked down the aisle? Send your tale to Cheryl Lavin, Tales From the Front, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611. Please include day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be used in whole or in part for any purpose and become the property of the column.
