Commitment is a hard thing for some people, and to make it more confusing to understand, everyone has various reasons to be nervous about it.  There is no rule of thumb when it comes to any sort of commitment.  I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently, most especially because one of my best friends is currently in the middle of a commitment crisis and I’m not sure what to do for her.  This girl (Venice) is the blonde version of me, we are almost scarily alike except for one very important respect: she’s overly emotional and I’m overly rational.  Which is why we are so glad to have the other, we balance each other out. 

Her problem is a toughie: her boyfriend of one year can’t seem to commit.  Even I, the most skittish of skittish fillies when it comes to this sort of thing, am positively baffled.  They are such a good match for each other, each has what the other person needs and they really bring out the best in each other.  Apart from that, they are just plain fun to be around.  They’re one of those couples you hate because of secret jealousy!  But here comes the kicker, and it’s an old problem: Venice wants to get married, he shows little sign of putting a ring on her finger anytime soon.  So, she’s stuck with the problem, does she stick with her commitment to him, or does she cut and run if he doesn’t make up his mind?  It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s what it boils down to.

I think girls get a bad rap for this one because lots would choose the latter, but I think they forget that the most deeply rooted instinct is for self-preservation and that’s a habit I understand deeply and personally.  But it does raise an interesting point, when should you put your commitment to someone else aside and remember your commitment to yourself?  Where do you cross the line from being self-preserving to being selfish?

I saw a couple of other things today that made me think even more about commitment.  The first was on the bus today, an extremely pregnant lady got on board after finishing her cigarette.  My surprise at this quickly morphed into a sort of anger that she would be doing something that would harm her child.  Addiction is a sort of commitment, and I saw that she had chosen it over her commitment to her baby.  The other thing was a man who came into the office today.  Apart from being overweight with too close, piggy eyes, massive glasses, and the worst combover I’ve ever seen, he was the most anal retentive man I’ve ever come across in my life…and my father’s in politics!  He was in a rage because some documents he wanted processed relied on current financial information, and the statements he had given us were from over two years ago.  I tried to explain the situation to him, but he was outrageously nasty to me and unbearably rude to the office at large (sidenote: I hate bullying worse than anything, it makes me see red in a way nothing else can.  I didn’t mind him snapping at me so much, but when he turned it on the secretaries who weren’t even working on his case, I wanted to heave a stapler at him!).  He refused to listen to my explanation of the nature of the law that requires current documents, he refused to accept our apologies for his inconvience, but what’s worse was that he refused to take the two seconds it would take to print out a current statement from the Internet to resolve the whole thing.  He just stood there growling at us all, ranting about the nature of the federal laws, the university, and us personally.  He was more commited to being angry than finding a resolution.  People like that offend me, there’s no dealing with them.

But these expiriences together have made me think about why commitment is such a tricky beast.  My own feelings about commitment have been undergoing a slow but steady process of change over the past year.  I’ll be the first to admit that for years the idea of commitment to anything made me practically break out in hives.  But this knee-jerk fear reaction has slowly been replaced by, well, something else that I haven’t quite pegged yet, but it’s certainly not paranoia.  The trouble is, I have a lifetime of bad habits to overcome: such as flinching whenever anyone mentions Plans or The Future, or overcoming the low level nausea that comes with thinking about the various types of relationships I have in my life.  My friend Bear summed our common plight up the best, “We’ve got the military brat problem: we’re really good at snapping defenses against people up and not good at lowering them back down again.  They have to be taken apart from the outside, without our knowledge or we’ll just reinforce!”  Bear’s an incredibly perceptive girl.  Commitment, for me is a muscle I’d like to strengthen but I’m not used to flexing.  I’m awfully bad at it, but in my defense it’s out of ignorance not intention! 

I think people are so afraid of it because with commitment comes consequences, I know I live in mortal fear of doing the same kind of damage that I have seen done to others and myself.  It’s in our nature to be afraid of consequences because what if the consequences of our choices result in something bad or unbearable?  The thing is, I’ve learned that life, as frustrating and hard as it can be from time to time, is almost never unbearable.  This knowledge makes fear of commitment seem irrational in some ways, but it remains in spite of logic because even if life is bearable, we don’t like to think it could spin off our well-plotted course and plan.  A girl who commits her feelings to a man who is uncertain of his own risks a terrible heartbreak, a woman who commits to her own desires over the guardianship of her baby risks that child’s health and her own happiness, a man who commits to his own opinions and grievances to the exclusions of others risks permanent and irrevocable friendlessness.  I think what most of us need to do is commit to something (a person, a plan, a hairdo, a diet, whatever), strap ourselves to it and see where the ride takes us.  True, we may not end up where we want or even where we thought we would end up, but any sort of movement has got to be better than sitting idle for the rest of our lives!  I know, I know…easier said than done.