Understanding the Male Commitment Process: Learn Why He Pulls Away & Why He Is Wired To Commit

Men are wired for commitment. However, until a man finds a woman that can give him more freedom *in* the relationship than outside of it, he will prioritize safeguarding his freedom. To a masculine, driven man, his freedom is his highest currency and it is crucial to his success in a competitive world.

For a man to experience freedom within a relationship, he needs to feel an intense emotional attraction that causes him to feel more alive when he is in your presence than when he is not. Until a man finds the right woman, he may think he finds more freedom by sleeping with many women only because he has not found the one woman who is stable enough in her own emotional world, that when he is with her, he already feels like he can have every woman. 

When a woman offers a man this — the freedom to connect to her emotional world and senses that it is safe (meaning she won’t later attack, become demanding or emotionally needy in a co-dependent way) - then the very desire a man has to be with many women transmutes of its own accord. Suddenly he realizes there is more safety and freedom with this one woman, than all the women in the world he could choose to be with. 

Men are aware that it is actually more work to engage in the courting process with many women, but until he finds a woman that brings him this level of emotional freedom, the idea of “commitment” will collide with his innate fear of losing his freedom. 

Ingrained within the masculine psyche is a primal desire to protect and provide, so for men, the idea of relationship and commitment naturally carries more weight and responsibility. 

What a woman may sense as a man’s resistance to commit, or see as his inability to ‘grow-up’ and ‘be a man’, is actually the weight of the responsibility that commitment carries for him. 

A man may also carry within himself the feeling that he can never “measure up”, and this wound will extend itself into relationships, because within him is the ideal of the man he expects of himself in relationship. 

The innate masculine drive within men programs them to “win”, so if a man feels he has not yet met the ideal he has set for himself, what he feels he needs to have accomplished and/or resources he feels he needs to provide for a wife and family, he will simply delay it. A man will not attempt an endeavor that he feels he has no chance of winning. 

For some men, the inner resistance may also be his own inner work that he needs to do, what are his childhood wounds that relationships force him to touch upon that he has not wanted to look at? 

So the worst thing a woman can do, then, is to try to pressure or force a man to commit if he is not ready. A man’s readiness to commit is an internal process that only happens once he has met certain milestones in his life or outside events (for example, the death of his father and/or mother) trigger him to want to commit to a woman and create a family of his own. 

While for women, the desire to commit and be in a relationship (even if she isn’t emotionally ready and still has inner work to do) feels like the most natural thing because relating and bonding are part of our biological makeup. Running primarily on the sex hormone estrogen, women are wired for connection.

If a man is not ready to commit, the only thing a woman can do to increase his desire to commit to her is give him more space and time. The less pressure he feels from a woman, the more he will be able to relax and take off the pressure that he already feels inside. 

It’s in understanding men that we can relate to his inner world and give him the space he needs to come closer at his own pace. 

If you are struggling in your relationships with men and your love life is just not where you hoped it would be by now, reach out to schedule a complimentary discovery HERE with me and let’s see how I can help.