Committed to not Committing

Can’t commit, won’t commit 

Modern dating, is there anything more depressing or lonely? The logic behind it just doesn’t make any sense to me. We avoid relationships because we’re worried about bearing our souls. Of being vulnerable with someone, of expressing any real interest and yet we spend our days trawling dating apps, matching with one another and enduring date after date, until finally we are so jaded that it just seems easier to give up all together.

We’ve become a generation of skeptics. Terrified of getting used, cheated on, led on, abandoned. The biggest fear of all being that we allow someone close enough that we might hand them the power to hurt us.

So, we stay single – aloof. Distant and unattached. And we do this for months, even years at a time and some of us will do it forever.

Yet despite our noncommittal nature, I’m willing to bet that it has not been all that long since our last heartbreaks. Many of us ‘singletons’ are still healing from that almost relationship, a friend with benefits deal gone wrong, a fling that we can’t quite shake. We’re still searching for closure and answers from people that we never made permanent features in our lives to begin with. And it’s confusing as hell.

We avoid committing because we are trying to protect — but it doesn’t make a difference, our hearts are breaking anyway. We’re getting all of the pain without any of the benefits of an actual real connection. 

We never fully choose them, yet we still experience the agony and the uncertainty that comes with loving someone fully and we guard ourselves from letting the good stuff trickle in. From slow mornings drinking coffee silently together wrapped in blankets. From dancing in the kitchen and kissing with sweet, wine stained lips. From heads nestled against chests and fingers intertwined. From soft embraces, raw passionate flesh and a listening ear at the end of a trying day. This is not protection – it’s sabotage. What we are doing is royally screwing ourselves; choosing fear over joy and we’re missing out on something potentially spectacular.

We avoid leaving our comfort zones, refusing to put ourselves out there or to grow attached, because we have learned to equate love with pain. Somewhere along the way we have forgotten how good it feels to rely on someone else; to share and to flourish together. The utter bliss of mornings and nights spent in each other’s arms.

Maybe we’ve just been hurt more times than we have been loved, so we think the worst of relationships. We question whether they are worth it when all is said and done. We tell ourselves we are better off without. That alone is safe. So, we destroy our todays because of the unknown of our tomorrows and live this futile existence.

But what we really need to do is to tell ourselves to stop running away. To stop distancing ourselves as soon as a relationship starts to feel even an ounce of realness. We need to come to terms with the idea that we are not protecting ourselves by staying alone, because with or without someone, we will undoubtedly have our hearts shattered either way. 

When we learn that we cannot control what our heart wants and ultimately that in this life we will be lost and found, loved and hurt, over and over again, and that we are powerless to this regardless of how hard we try to push people away, it’s then and only then that we will find ourselves less alone.