Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Schickel

Schickel’s line lands because it demotes a supposedly dramatic male dilemma into something banal, sniffly, and seasonal. Calling fear of commitment a “common cold” is a surgical insult: it suggests the condition is widespread, mildly incapacitating, and treated with a lot of noisy self-pity despite rarely being fatal. The metaphor also implies contagion. This isn’t just an individual quirk; it’s a socially transmitted script, passed around in locker rooms, rom-coms, and office chatter until it feels like biology.

The phrase “male psyche” does extra work. Schickel isn’t diagnosing “men” as a fixed category so much as pointing at a culture of masculinity that rewards emotional evasiveness and rebrands it as independence. Commitment becomes framed not as a choice with trade-offs but as a threat to the self, a kind of psychic flu that must be avoided at all costs. The subtext is that the real illness isn’t attachment; it’s the fragile self-concept that interprets intimacy as confinement.

There’s also a critique of how men are allowed to narrate their avoidance as sophistication. A cold is a convenient excuse: you can’t be blamed for sneezing. By pathologizing commitment-phobia in this low-stakes way, Schickel punctures the myth of the tortured bachelor and replaces it with something less romantic: an everyday, culturally enabled fear dressed up as personality. The line’s bite comes from its refusal to treat that fear as profound. It’s ordinary, and that’s the point.