#commitment phobics

There’s no silver bullet to fix the “Dating Apocalypse” except patience and people dedicated to treating someone like a priority as opposed to an option. We can’t expect to receive all the perks of dating without commitment and vulnerability. The damage will continue. We’ll only continue to breed shallowness and superficiality into our dating lives while — deep down — we want to be fully known and loved by someone.

Sooner or later people who identify as a victim are going to paint you as an oppressor. Victims need to be victims of somebody, and you can count on it that that somebody is going to be you eventually. Believe it or not, there are people who want to be victims because if they are victims they don’t have to take responsibility for their lives and they think they will attract help or a rescuer. Certainly you may wrong a friend, we all do, but you want friends who will talk openly and honestly about what you’ve done and make amends, not flop on the floor like a European soccer player.

I remembered the time that I asked him to watch the kids and I came back to find that he had traded them for remote control cars. When I shrilly demanded to know where the kids were he hid under a blanket and whispered, “Kids are hard.” I yelled that he was a bad parent, and that only a moron would trade the kids in for remote control cars. This is why I had never left him alone with the kids before. But now I realize that he was never going to learn to not trade the kids in for toys if I never trusted him enough to figure it out for himself. In this society that constantly tells men that women are better at not selling kids for toys, is it no wonder that my husband sold our kids for toys?

Without labels to connect us, I have no justification for my feelings and he has no obligation to acknowledge them. No labels, no drama, right? I think my generation is venturing into some seriously uncharted waters, because while we’re hesitant to label relationships, we do participate in some deviation of them. But by not calling someone, say, 'my boyfriend,' he actually becomes something else, something indefinable. And what we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity to move on. Instead, we spend our emotional energy on someone we’ve built up and convinced ourselves we need. We fixate on a person who may not be right for us simply because he never wronged us. Because without a label, he never really had the chance.

There is a constant feeling in our culture that we might be missing out on something better, therefore, we rarely commit to a decision that we can’t back out of if something better comes along.