He's
a chic lit cliché: the guy who can't commit. He loves the heroine,
truly he does, and they're clearly compatible, in bed and out, but
somehow he can't quite take that step. He can't make himself pop the
question and join his life with hers happily ever after, 'til death
do us part.
Actually,
it's not a literary myth. My sister's husband was like that. It took
five years, two breakups and some therapy before they finally tied
the knot. I'm not ridiculing him. It was a painful and difficult
process for him to get to that point. Commitment often is.
However,
if you don't commit, you go through life skimming the surface,
flitting from one person or activity to another, never experiencing
the depth and beauty that's available. Commitment brings emotional
and spiritual rewards that are well worth the pain.
The
general understanding is that “commitment” is a kind of
transition, a phase change, a final stepping over some line. Before
you make a commitment, you're in one place. After the act, you are
someplace else altogether. You commit and then you breathe a sigh of
relief. That's over.
That's
not the way it works, in my experience.
As
I've shared in other posts, I was anorexic in my late teens. After
the acute phase was over and I returned to college, I still had
anything but a normal relationship with food. I still weighed myself
daily. I binged on calorie-free items like cantaloupe, cabbage and
popcorn (without butter). I felt guilty whenever I ate a real meal.
To
try and cope with these behaviors and feelings, I joined Overeaters
Anonymous. OA is a twelve step program modeled on AA for people who
have food-related disorders or addictions. I already knew something
about how AA worked, as my mom was a recovered alcoholic. The first
of the twelve steps, revised for the OA context, reads: “We
admitted that we were powerless over food, that our lives had become
unmanageable.” That was me. I wasn't overweight, but food was
using up way too much of my mental and emotional energy.
In
AA, you make a commitment to stay sober, to abstain from drinking
alcohol. No one forces you to do this, by the way. You can come to AA
forever and keep drinking; the heart of the program is that you,
personally, must decide to become sober. Of course one can't abstain
from food. The OA equivalent of sobriety, called “abstinence” is
to eat three healthy meals a day with nothing in-between.
I
made a commitment to abstinence. I tried to stop my bizarre food
behaviors. I tried to release the fear of getting fat. It wasn't as
easy as it might sound.
One
motto of the twelve step approach is “Just for today”. The idea
is that if you tried to commit to never drinking again, ever, that
would seem totally impossible. You would sabotage yourself before you
even began. So, wisely, the twelve step approach advises that you
simply commit to being sober (or abstinent) today. Today is all you
have anyway. You could be dead tomorrow. So don't worry about what
you're going to do in the future, or how you're going to survive.
Focus on where you are. Focus on now. Make a commitment for today and
let tomorrow take care of itself.
Simplistic
as it sounds, this approach seems to work.
I've
come to believe that this is the essence of all commitment. For
romance fans, “commitment” usually brings to mind marriage. I've
been married more than 30 years now—even though I never expected
that I'd marry at all. It's true that my marriage is a bit atypical:
we have no children, we are professional colleagues as well as mates,
in our younger days we were not sexually exclusive. I suspect my
marriage is easier than those of many of my readers. Still, there are
times when I get fed up with my DH and really want to walk out,
slamming the door behind me. (I'm sure he feels the same about me
every now and again.) Or I worry about the future, as we are both
getting older (and he is eleven years older than I). How will I
manage if I have to be his caretaker instead of his companion and
co-conspirator (as we promised in our wedding vows)?
Then
I stop myself. I remember that I've made a commitment to love him,
share my life with him, take responsibility for him, as he does for
me. But I don't need to think about forever. I only need to reassert
my commitment now, today.
This
is the way that all good marriages are built, in my opinion. One day
at a time. Commitment is not a single act, but a process to be
repeated each day. That makes it easier—and in realistically,
making a commitment today is all we can ever do.
