The Partner Who Avoids Promises

What you need to know — but don’t want to admit to yourself

It’s interesting how someone can say they’re doing things for all the right reasons, but a deeper, inner knowing tells us it isn’t true. How often we listen to that knowing is debatable. Many of us forge ahead into the fire rather than paying attention to the smoke. We see what we want to — and get burned all the same.

There are a few things we need to know about the partner who avoids promises. Of course, we both want to know the truth and are doing everything we can to avoid it. Lizzo said it best: Truth hurts.

Avoiding Commitment, Not Demonstrating Integrity

The partner avoiding promises isn’t doing it because they have such incredible integrity and are being careful not to break their word in any way. They are avoiding promises to avoid being trapped by them. It’s commitment issues disguised as integrity, and I know I’ve fallen for it, too. It sounds so nice — they don’t want to hurt us by making promises and then things don’t work out later. They care about our feelings.

No, they care about their feelings and how it will feel if they make a promise, break it, and have to live with it. They call it integrity, but there’s a mix of commitment issues, dishonesty (with themselves or others), and immaturity thrown in the mix. It would be more honest to say that they won’t make a promise because they aren’t fully committed to the relationship.

These partners often have a sob story behind their avoidance of promises, and they’ll spin it in a way that seems perfectly reasonable. That story will usually avoid accountability and show plenty of red flags that they haven’t prioritized their healing. But we’ve all been hurt. Everyone has either broken a promise or had one broken. Failed relationships litter most of our pasts. It’s not a good reason to refuse to make promises to anyone else.

Honestly, I call this Superhero Syndrome. Watch any superhero movie other than Iron Man, and you’ll see it. They have their dark secrets and the decisions they make out of supposed integrity. Often, these decisions deny their partners personal agency. They hide the truth and make decisions for them — often claiming these decisions were made to protect them. This isn’t integrity. There’s nothing heroic about hurting people and claiming it’s in their best interests.

Unhealthy Partners and Their Self-Interest

Someone who loves us won’t watch us fall apart and go without having our needs met just because their own needs are being met within the relationship. That’s using people, not loving them. Sadly, unhealthy people often don’t see this is what they’re doing. They have a million reasons for why they won’t make promises or even talk about the future, and every single one of them comes back to what they want and need with little to no regard for how it impacts anyone else.

Unhealthy people often don’t have healthy balance or boundaries in relationships. The truth is that we’re equally unhealthy when we partner them and stick around to put up with it. A healthy partner will leave a relationship that can’t or won’t meet their needs. A healthy partner will also leave a relationship where the person they love is suffering because their needs can’t or won’t be met within the relationship. Either way, healthy people don’t stay in one-sided relationships.

They may honestly love us. That’s the truth we want to hear. We often want to leave it at that, but it’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is that they can love us and want the best for us and still do what’s best for them because they aren’t healthy enough to be strong partners. We can wait around and hope they get healthy later, but the cost to us is immeasurable.

Relationships aren’t just made up of the time we spent in them; they also include the time we spent grieving for them. We can wait around hoping the partner we love gets healthy enough to love us in the way we need, but we may be prolonging the relationship and our eventual grief when it ends. To be healthy ourselves, we need to stop partnering potential and look at the reality of our relationships.

Promises Aren’t the Problem

Any partner who won’t talk about the future is clearly telling us that we won’t have one with them. Promises aren’t the problem. The future is going to happen whether or not we plan for it, but if we take that step to partner someone, we should see them being part of our future whether or not it ends up working out that way.

Otherwise, the only way to have integrity in relationships is to be honest enough to admit when we see something as playing a short-term role without having long-term potential. There are casual relationships perfectly suited to people who feel this way. The sad reality is that an unhealthy partner who is getting their needs met won’t tell us the truth in case we leave what’s working for them.

In a healthy relationship, promises aren’t seen as ropes that tie them down. Promises are hope. They’re potential. Promises are the way we build a life to share with someone we love. It’s including them in the plan with every intention of following through.

Yes, promises can be broken. They often are. Even “I love you” is an implied promise that they always will. No one is going to go around saying “I only love you now” or “I love you this minute”. The implication is that love will continue. It doesn’t always. Sometimes, it was simply an illusion. Other times, people outgrow the relationship. I’ve also seen love die when it’s been damaged one too many times within the relationship. “I love you”, when withdrawn, is one of the most heartbreaking ways people break their promises.

We’re only human. We can break promises even with the best of intentions. But is that better than avoiding promises completely and leaving the other person questioning our sincerity, fidelity, or commitment?

I would argue that avoiding promises is all about what suits them, and there is no deeper philosophical reason behind it. It’s cowardice or commitment-phobia or some other unhealthy reason. Integrity doesn’t look like someone who won’t give their word. It looks like someone who can make a promise and do their very best to keep it.