Forget marriage – this is what modern commitment-phobes are really afraid of in relationships

Two female friends, one Gen Z, one millennial, shared two very similar stories about commitment with me recently. The former, whom I’ll call Eve, was dating an eligible and engaging young man – let’s call him Eric. After seeing each other for a few months, they booked their first holiday together; before they went away, “I love you”s were exchanged. The pair spent a magical long weekend stomping around European churches and museums, returning home more smitten than ever. But despite all of this, the “B-word” – boyfriend – had never, not once, been brought up. While it was assumed that they were exclusive, there was no guarantee: they’d never had The Chat.

The second friend, let’s call her Mel, is a decade ahead in her mid-thirties. She started dating a man 10 years her senior and things quickly became serious, with multiple dates per week, romantic nights away, and plans to meet each other’s families. They were a couple in all but name. But when she asked whether she could call him her boyfriend, he “squirmed”. Things were moving “too fast”, he said – he wasn’t sure he could commit to taking things to the “next level”.

It seems to be part of a wider trend in which any label even vaguely suggestive of commitment raises people’s hackles. A decade ago, deciding to live together, get married or have kids were the serious emotional investment markers. Making things “official” was, conversely, no big deal – a casual step up from just “dating” or “seeing each other” that might be flung out from a few weeks in once it became clear that things were going reasonably well and neither party was an obvious psychopath. Now, asking to call someone your boyfriend feels tantamount to proposing.

“These titles of boyfriend and girlfriend – or even going out ‘officially’ – aren’t easily casual these days in the way they used to be,” agrees Marian O’Connor, a couples psychotherapist at Tavistock Relationships. “People often have the exclusivity conversation, telling people ‘I’m coming off the apps’ as if it’s a declaration of love!”

Dating and relationships coach Kate Mansfield has witnessed this pronounced shift in her clients over the past 10 years. “Millennials often tend to be more traditional about labels, wanting to define their relationships clearly, maybe because they grew up with more conventional views on dating,” she says. “But Gen Z? They’re much more fluid and experimental. They’re often hesitant to use those terms, viewing them as a big commitment that can bring on pressure.”

Commitment phobia is, of course, nothing new. We’ve been talking about it for decades, particularly in relation to men (and there’s a slew of self-help books with names like Women Who Love Too Much and Men Who Can’t Love to prove it).

“I’ve been in practice for 25 or so years, and there’s always been this attitude that men are more commitment-phobic than women,” says psychologist Wendy Dignan. Mansfield agrees that, “from what I’ve seen, commitment-phobia does tend to pop up more in men across generations”, but clarifies that “it’s definitely not just a guy thing”.

This wariness about jumping into a relationship with both feet can stem from various issues, often traced back to childhood. “Some people find it really hard to commit and are in quite a lot of anxiety and agony about it,” says O’Connor. “In a Freudian sense, men have to ‘escape their mother’ – and it can feel, for a man, like he’s being dragged into something too claustrophobic in a romantic relationship, depending on the relationship he had with his mother growing up.”

While it’s natural for anyone to feel trepidation when embarking on a new relationship – unsure of whether this is the right person, nervous about making themselves vulnerable – commitment-phobia is something different, where natural anxieties become irrational and all-consuming. “We’re talking about an avoidant attachment style; it’s really about a deep, often unconscious fear that stops someone from diving into, and staying in, a serious relationship,” says Mansfield. “For some, this can stem from witnessing parental divorce, making them cautious.” Others may experience commitment issues as part of a larger problem relating to mental health or lack of emotional wellbeing: “People with past trauma often prioritise self-care, career, hobbies and travel over traditional timelines for commitment,” she adds.

The latest trend – the elevation of “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” from no-big-deal description to high-stakes emotional step-up – has grown in line with the notion of “situationships”. It’s become an increasingly common term for relationships that are nebulous in status, and can be either infuriating or liberating, depending on your attitude towards fixed boundaries. Reality show Love Island, the modern dating agenda-setter for many Brits, has also popularised the notion that there are various set stages to ramping up a coupling, each more serious than the last. Deciding to “be exclusive” is a common precursor to the boy/girlfriend conversation that nevertheless still often has all the hallmarks of being a weighty decision.

“I think it’s very much a product of that sort of age, being in your twenties and thirties,” says Dignan of the “situationship” description. “It’s reflective of how we have relationships now – that it’s more fluid and a little bit more relaxed.”

Wendy Dignan, psychologist

The problems can come when resistance to defining a relationship is used as a kind of plausible deniability – a get-out-of-jail-free card that enables one party to shirk any responsibility for the other person’s feelings. “We all avoid uncomfortable truths, so we all have this version of reality that makes sometimes questionable behaviour seem acceptable,” theorises Dignan. “If there’s not a label – if you’re in a relationship, but you’ve not actually called it a relationship – it means that you’re able to say to yourself, ‘Well, I’m not a bad person, I’ve not been unfaithful, because I’m not in a relationship.’”

Some may well want to eschew labels because they live with the constant niggling worry that somebody “better” might come along. This grass-is-greener attitude has been hugely exacerbated by the proliferation of dating apps, and the potential to keep swiping through endless options.

“Desire” hormones would normally be satisfied by relationships – touch and closeness release feelgood oxytocin and send serotonin coursing through you, O’Connor tells me. “Now, that desire thing is sometimes switched to ‘I could find someone better’ – to swipe on another and another and another,” she says. “Some people get quite addicted to the search rather than the satisfaction – they’re responding to the dopamine drive of ‘I want another’, rather than reaching the satisfaction stage of a relationship that would heal the need for that dopamine drive.”

Sometimes that translates to simply messaging – or even just matching – on the apps and never taking things further. Sometimes it translates to serial dating and pursuing multiple women simultaneously, leading to the birth of social media groups such as “Are we dating the same guy?”, where women name and shame men who they believe might be cheating.

But looking at bigger lifestyle trends, this delay in committing to even being someone’s boyfriend could be reflective of the wider movement towards “kidulthood” – whereby those in their twenties, thirties and even forties put off the traditional markers of adulthood in favour of perpetual liberty. Statistically, in the UK and around the world, we’re getting married and having children – if we do these things at all – much later than our parents did.

“The rise of this ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ is totally a thing I see in my clients’ dating lives,” reveals Mansfield. “Millennials might feel pressured to achieve career success before settling down, delaying traditional milestones. Gen Z often values experiences over stability, which can lead to a hesitance to commit.”

More adults seem hesitant to take on the responsibilities that come with serious relationships and family life because “we value freedom and the individual over traditional family values”, she adds. “This often shows up as a reluctance to label things, or as a focus on personal freedom over stability.”

Part of this is rooted in circumstance – with job insecurity rampant and housing unaffordable for many young people, the concept of “settling down” feels completely out of reach. Simultaneously, as women have become more empowered, some heterosexual men have had to wrestle with understanding what their role is in a contemporary society in which there’s no guarantee that they’ll be the main breadwinner in their relationship. “Stereotypes and standards have changed so much, so rapidly, over the last few years that a lot of men struggle to know who they are and what they’re supposed to be,” says Dignan.

If there is seemingly no chance of building the kind of stable life that your parents had, the temptation is to stop chasing it, shun responsibility, and throw yourself into living in the moment. Yet the later we put off having a committed relationship, the trickier it might be to give up that freedom, according to O’Connor.

“Committing becomes more difficult as we get older, because you’ve stretched your limbs, you know what you like. In your twenties, making a life together with a partner – building a home, for example – might feel like an act of creativity. But in your thirties, you’ve already done that work and created a pretty good life for yourself. You may struggle to give that up.”

Marian O’Connor, couples psychotherapist

To frame it in a positive light: the happier you are, the less likely you are to settle. It’s why the experts say the issue is not confined to men being afraid of the B-word; women are also increasingly cautious about the G-word. “In my work, I have seen a huge shift in women resisting labels in the past 10 years,” Mansfield tells me. “I think this is down to more financial independence and equality, and women across the board valuing freedom and getting more in touch with their emotional needs – and in many ways, it’s a story about the inability of men to meet these adequately.”

Dignan has noticed a similar uptick in women struggling to commit: “Definitely more and more women are becoming a little bit fearful about tying themselves to a particular guy,” she says. “Particularly older women, who decide they want a baby and haven’t got a suitable male partner, are going in for IVF quite happily in the knowledge that they won’t be financially tied to a man because they share a child together.”

So, in this era of modern love, do we even need labels? Or should we just let relationships grow organically, unfettered by the pressure of attaching particular terminology? That completely depends on the couple in question and your individual needs, according to the experts. Some people thrive with boundaries and struggle to feel secure without a fixed designation. Others will feel confined or boxed in by the possessiveness of “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”. The most important thing is to figure out what you need in order to feel comfortable, and communicate that openly.

“If you’re seeing someone who won’t put a label on things, I’d suggest having a heart-to-heart,” says Mansfield. “Talk about how you feel and what you want from the relationship. Try to understand where he/she is coming from – ask them why they are avoiding labels. It’s all about assessing compatibility: if having a label is super important to you and they’re not on board, you might need to rethink if this is the right fit.”

If Shakespeare had it right – and a rose by any other name really would smell as sweet – perhaps we should try to trust that a relationship minus the label could still grow into something beautiful.