Rough guess #1: Commitment to a person

Let’s take a break from the heavy, obscure stuff today and go Dear Abby. Setting aside the old cliché’s countless exceptions, we ask: Why can’t men “commit”? And why can young women, even in their late teens, stick with a guy who may not be stable or of sterling character, may not have a whole lot going for him? He is her man! I guarantee you that under the surface there is more symbiosis than love. And what is it with the young men who are still in fraternity mode, stray, look at porn, remain preternaturally affiliated with their high school guy friends?

Or we could vastly generalize and ask: What is “committing” in a relationship, and why does it feel wrong or impossible when it does?

I believe one answer is found in the phenomenon’s similarity to the urge many people feel to stay up late every night, not go to bed at a normal hour. They aren’t simply feeling they’d be cutting short the potential of the day. They are feeling, or sensing, rather, that they have never grasped their life, become a person yet, and to go to sleep early would kill their chance to find some truth.

Young men are not ready to commit because in the childhood restriction of emotions under the weight of paternal culture, they could never just be children. They could never just be loved for their protean selves. To expect them at the doorway of chronological adulthood, at 18 or 25, to give up any chance to be that child, to give up that life-and-death need to be, to now kill that need and become a woman’s needs, is to kill and bury themselves.

I have seen it often. I had been it when I was 24 and wouldn’t, over summer break from grad school, bring my girlfriend to my parents’ home. And I have had female clients who are so troubled – emotional kaleidoscopes on steroids – that they should want to figure themselves out and become an autonomous person before they dedicate themselves to a marijuana boy or construction worker, yet they cling to the world of two people now and forever. How can they do this? What is wrong, or right, with them?

If there is a cardinal truth about this, it seems to be confounded by the facts that countless men, including myself and stalkers, are the most dependent shell-less eggs possible, and that probably as many women are intrepid soloists. My character of independence, pre-marriage, was a cover of numbness and cultural expectation. I sometimes wonder if my wife, despite her apparent solid and seamless dedication for twenty-five years, could take this institution of marriage or leave it. Intrapsychically, she seems to be her own person or island.

Still, I see these clients who have never found themselves, yet unlike men, they are not antsy about settling down. I do not think it is maturity. I believe it is the girl in the woman, true to the dependent child, unlike the false macho little boy, yet confused by her societal imprint as the nurturer. We are so mixed up, or as I’ve said in previous posts, we are the molecular mess.

What is commitment to a person? I have committed to my wife for all these years and will continue to ’til my end, but there is still something deeply buried inside me that doesn’t feel good about it. I long ago overpowered that bit of indigestion. I think the abyssal bottom line is: Don’t most of us still have a primordial need – our earliest uncooked seeds – to be a complete person before we can give ourselves to anything else? (Even those who cling passionately to another person or project or crusade to replace that seed). Aren’t we still in the crib waiting to be picked up and soothed for all time, so we finally feel OK, a calm and serene statement not a question? Needing what Dr. Janov noted: “There is nothing that calms a child more than being loved”?*

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* I don’t know which Janov book contains this quote, or if I got it perfectly right. He might have said: “There is nothing that calms a child more than feeling loved.”