Two months after Jenny and Sam started living together; Jenny decided to take up Japanese and tennis. She was harried – what with Tuesday and Thursday nights at the language school, Wednesday and Friday nights at the courts – but she was happy.

Sam was not. “I never see you,” he said.

“But these are things I really want to do,” she said defensively.

He said yeah, but did she have to do them both a once? He presented her with this fact, calculator in hand: In two months, they had spent precisely nine evenings together. “Nine,” he said, “out of sixty-two.” He then said, “I want you home more.”

At this, Jenny went a little crazy. “I need some space,” she heard herself saying. “I’m not going to stay home all the time just because somebody wants to tie me down.

”When men call women on pulling back, they do not believe them. They deny it. They are projecting, women say. They just want their dinner cooked. They are just some male control problems.

But the big pull back, it turns out, is not limited to the other gender. Even though you crave love and closeness, you have an unconscious that fears commitment. It races toward love, then hides from it.

When your unconscious is expressed directly, like Jenny’s, you might suddenly find yourself very, very busy. Sometimes it is trickier: You are not busy, you are sick. “For three nights in a row after we got engaged, I threw up,” Liz, a friend of Jenny, admits. Another woman got a huge migraine headache after “a theoretical discussion of monogamy” with her boyfriend.

Or, your brain plays odd tricks: Days after she told her lover she would marry him, Kelly mysteriously lost all feeling for the man. She did not hate him; she did not even dislike him. She just felt numb. Her emotional wall was as effective a distancing mechanism as Jenny’s tennis and Japanese lessons.

Some people pull back by pushing. “If you can see me only on weekends, I think we should forget it,” Rose told Jim after a particularly nice Saturday and Sunday together – knowing he was happy with their still-new weekends-only dating ritual. “I was happy with it, too,” she said gloomily after their breakup. “But I was scared, and I needed to do something dramatic to push him away.”It can get very complicated. The key to recognizing the big pullback is, first, to acknowledge the existence of ambivalence – the very word means a simultaneous push and pull – and to learn how that contradiction makes you feel. Then, once you know your ambivalence “style,” you can do something about it. Some women say the acknowledgement itself erases some symptoms, like migraines and numbness. But some women change their ways. Jenny stopped the Japanese lessons. Sam kept talking about her “commitment phobia.”

“Okay, okay! Enough!” she said. “I’ll stop! No more Japanese lessons! Sayonara!” That opened up Tuesday and Thursdays. To see Jenny on Wednesdays and Fridays, however, Sam will have to learn tennis.

So, if you are like Jenny, it is time to face your commitment phobia or else, you will be missing the opportunity to be happy with someone you really love.