Let's admit, to begin with, that not everyone who sticks with a relationship stays out of loyalty to a commitment.
Some people are just covering their bets. They have too much to lose by separating. So they choose the lesser of two evils, and stick it out.
Some people just gets used to each other. They don't like surprises; they stay with each other because they feel settled in. Comfortable.
She knows when he's coming home, what he will say when he gets in the door, what he drinks before supper and what he is likely to talk about while he eats dinner, how he takes his clothes off-shoes first, shirt next, then socks, and when he is likely to get a notion to make love. He never unsettles her with the shocker that he has changed his mind. She knows what he is going to say, he knows what she is going to say, so mostly, neither bothers.
Oh, one could get cynical about such "commitment". The jaded confessor in the Albert Camus book THE FALL looked at one man's commitment this way: " I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people...and that explains most human commitments....Hurrah then for funerals."
Let the cynic have his say. I put his misanthropic sentiments on record, just to show that there is more than one way to look at some commitments.
But why grouse about settledness? What looks like soul-choking boredom to people who prefer not to know what's coming next, can be gentle settledness for those of us who do better without daily surprises. And settledness wears well. Even if it doesn't keep the joy bells clanging in our hearts.
Other people stay around because they wager that what they have is not as bad as what they think may be the alternative.
There could be a badgered banker in Sioux falls who would leave his wife tomorrow if he did not put such a high price tag on his place in the community. He has a severe case of the twenty-year itch, and is absolutely certain that a life-satisfying relationship-to which he feels he has every right to-is waiting for him just beyond the boundaries of the marriage that throttles his untested potential for passion. But he, being prudent as well as itchy, knows he needs the respect of all the folk at first reformed Church; he can't afford to get out of good graces with the profamily constituency there. He needs the goodwill of his wife's family also; it owns too big a chunk of Sioux Falls real estate, hefty collateral on bank loans, for him to risk alienation from them. And he wants to keep his old friends. So he sticks with his marriage, mainly because he is so heavily invested in Sioux falls.
Transplant the Sioux Falls banker to Southern California, give him big city anonymity. Where he could be divorced several times over without anyone at first National headquarters even noticing, and he might leave his wife two months after arrival. But a first National of Sioux falls. He has to be the very model of marital reliability.
Credit the banker with common sense, but don't give him an A+ for commitment.
Other people are simply trapped. A talented lady I know has agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces-and a husband who brutalizes her in several subtle styles. I think she would leave in a minute, but she can't get away because she does not dare go outside to look for a job and she can't afford to live anywhere else but at home with him.
Give her credit, maybe, for not putting arsenic in his coffee, but don't confuse her staying with commitment.
Not everybody sticks with what he or she is stuck with out of a heroic effort to keep a promise. I mean no discredit. It's simply that many of us stick with things because the alternatives to staying are even less attractive.
But let's talk about people who really do choose to live by promises-spoken or unspoken-they have made. They don't keep their promises simply because they have made them once and are stuck with them. In fact, commitment keepers don't usually think much about the fact that they have made promises.
They don't stay because they feel stuck to a vow that some eternal law obliges them keep; they just care about the persons to whom they are quietly committed.
Another reason we keep commitments has to do with BELONGING to people.
BELONGING to people is risky. It could be a subtle way of being owned by somebody, the way a person can own a hunk of real estate, a chattel, or a slave. But we can also belong to people simply by putting ourselves at their side. Their place becomes our place. Their needs become our needs. Their destiny our destiny. BELONGING can be a way of loving.
The Albert Camus Story THE PLAGUE is about a person's sense of BELONGING and therefore about commitment, even though nobody mentions the word.
The people of the town of Oran knee they were in for something dreadful when the rats came out of the dark places to die in their streets and hallways and when, once the rats were all dead, the citizens began to die the same way. The cup of dread was full by the time a thousand persons were dying of the plague every week, and the sanitation department began hauling bodies by the tramload, at night, when nobody was looking, to a city dump. Eventually the town was quarantined to protect other towns in the province; nobody could get in or out.
Dr. Bernard Rieux was caught in the plague, just like everyone else, and it never occured to him to try to get out of town, even though he longed to join his wife, who happened at the time to be a patient at a resort in the country.
A journalist named Raymond Rambert was caught in Oran too, and he wanted to get out in the worst way. "Why should I stay, " he asked Dr. Rieux," I'm different from the rest of the people; I don't belong here.
But he was stuck. And, for nothing better to do, he began going with Dr. Rieux on his daily rounds to make dying a little less horrible for the people, and maybe save some children. Rambert pitched in, doing whatever a layperson could do to help people die with some dignity.
One day a person smuggler offered Rambert a chance to get out-for a price.
But he surprised Rieux by deciding to stay.
Stay? Why stay, Rieux asked. "Your happeness is waiting for you in Paris. You have every right to be happy. And you certainly cannot be happy here."
Rambert's answer provides us with one of the better secrets of why people keep commitments: "Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I'd no concern with people. But now that I've seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not."
Rambert and Rieux were in the same boat; they were committed because they Belong.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing