I was having a convo w/ a friend the other night & she was talking about her man's trouble w/ differentiating between what has happened in other people's lives & what can happen in his. This is a VERY common issue w/ today's young man. I've seen it for myself, I've heard it from male friends, & I've heard stories about the very same thing. It troubles me because this inability or unwillingness to apply a case-by-case basis of evaluation to your circumstances affects not only you and your well-being, but also that of those around you (friends, family, significant others, etc.)
Let me give another disclaimer before I get too deep. I am not suggesting that the men who do this do it all the time, unfortunately it's often only applied to social situations. Also, I am not suggesting that only men do this. Many women do too, but it's not usually the men who get hurt as a consequence of a woman over-generalizing. Ok, back to it.
Example time: let's say there's a couple who have been in a relationship for a long time. Things are getting serious. They've started talking about marriage, heavily. Suddenly, he gets distant. Not due to commitment phobia, but to an over-generalization. All he sees around him are dysfunctional marriages that may suffer from infidelity, bickering, jealousy, loss of "the spark", or any number of other factors. This might make anyone a little skittish. As such, the man in the relationship gets distant, nonchalant, less talkative, not himself. 
Of course, he doesn't initially share this apprehension with his lady, but something I've noticed with today's young man is that this is pretty much paralyzing for them. They think that because this is what they've seen woth others, their friends, their family, or whomever, that this is what their marriage will be like.
We've always heard that men are the simpler sex, & I think, to some degree, that's true. In this case, that idea applies in that the man in this relationship has over-simplified circumstances in his life. He has made his life a bit too black and white. Life is grey, ladies & gents. You can't apply the same idea to a different situation if the people, circumstances, time, & thought processes are all different! I get the fear. It's valid, but you're selling yourself & your significant other INCREDIBLY short. If you want things to be different, do everything in your power to make it so. Don't let someone else's circumstances dictate your own.
Young man of today, focus on your own relationship. If there's something you want with your significant other, do it. Go after it. Don't let what your buddies do or say phase you or make you timid. From what I've seen, this affects you guys not only in your relationship, but it also starts to trickle down into other aspects of your life. Pretty soon, you'll find yourself biologically intertwined with your sofa & it takes a natural disaster to unstick your ass from the couch for reasons you don't understand (that paralysis thing I was talking about)
OR you go out & act a damn fool out galavanting & doing things you know you have no business doing, as an act of rebellion (also a form of paralysis, emotional, that is). 
Don't do this to yourself, gentlemen, but more importantly, do that to your lady.
