Are Men Commitment- Phobic

Say the word marriage and watch him evaporate. Men are commitment phobic. Commitment and the 'M' word-the word mentioned and silence settles over the room. The maiden in this happy couple has just taken a treacherous step; she just mentioned the 'M' word. The guy's heartbeat begins to race, beads of sweat drop down his brow and he begins to assess the viability of running away. The man in this case is commitment- phobic.

"Commitment for men is a one-way street towards marriage and marriage is scary. Hence, with men, it's not so much commitment phobia; it's marriage –phobia. That's the thought that really haunts men because once commitment is on the table, marriage is an impending side dish. It's natural pairing that the sub-conscious mind of a man cannot avoid, so no matter how much evidence you provide to the contrary, commitment means marriage or at the very least a de facto state that resembles it," says psychologist Dr. Seema Hingorani.

The word marriage throws up a lot of issues for men, especially those that enjoy freedom. This is not to say that marriage is some sort of a prison or vice, but what women don't understand is that men just escaped from one sort of prison. We just grew up and got away from our parents. It's the independence that all kids at some point or the other, no matter how happy their childhood was, deeply crave. "It's a freeing thought finally knowing that we have the domain to our selves, come home when you want to, stay up at late as you would like, don't iron your clothes, and leave your room a mess, anything goes," says fashion designer Rocky S.

The women come along and ruin everything. "Women tell men to do exactly those things that we thought we grew out of doing in the first place and marriage, to men, represents the legally binding contract that states we have to obey that dictum. No wonder marriage scares us, its reality. It's the world telling us to grow up. It's the same thing that the world told us when we were kids but we were on too much sugar to sit in one place and listen. Marriage is all grown up and all grown up is not what men want to be," says Rahul Bose, a software engineer from Kolkata.

Every one hates it when their cherished dreams end. The dream is about everything being perfect and nice. Men think that they are living that dream every day when they are single. When a man is single and unattached he thinks he is the reincarnation of Achilles and the women of the world are fainting at the very sight of him. This is, of course, not true and almost all men are single by compulsion and not choice, but it's probably nice having that thought in the mind. Hence, marriage of long-term commitment for that matter means a tremendous loss for the rest of the women of the world at least that's what men think.

If a man starts to warm up to the idea of committed relationship through some form of denial, let it happen. Men use denial all the time, it's perfectly natural. For example, a man might say- I am not going bold, I just shaved my head because I wanted to look like Bruce Wills or I would buy a sports car, but it's just so harsh on the environment. No man cares about the environment as much as he does about a sports car and almost every man is invariably going bald. It's what men do; they ignore certain obvious facts and build up nice little ideas in their place. With denial, a man can easily merge into a committed relationship and say we are just taking each day as it comes, whilst in the meantime the woman in the relationship is free to continue to move forward on the commitment front.

Commitment surely is a big deal for guys and it's a major leap, but sometimes all a grown man needs are a few comfortable baby steps.