One of the major themes that seems to keep popping up in my writing is the idea of commitment. Its a word that somehow seems to get under most of our skin. Even seeing it all typed out in blue like that is enough to make me squirm in my seat just a little. And that is exactly the phenomenon that I am trying to point out. Somehow our culture, or society or moral norms have changed life for us twenty-somethings. We aren’t like our parents, in that most of us couldn’t get married and make a life for our families at 20 or 21. Most of us need (or think we need) until 30 to get it figured out. Now for those of you who read my blog on marriage, you know that I think that it a complicated issue that cant easily be argued one way or the other.

It was a blog from a good friend of mine, Ben Schroff, call “I am Divorced” that began to focus my idea of commitment. And of course, going with the notion that none of us really ever have an original thought, Ben was able to pull much of his thoughts from a speaker with YWAM. Patrick Dodson. If you have a moment to listen to his ideas on relationships- well his ideas on anything really – they are amazing.

But what Patrick and Ben were getting at is the idea that we are incredibly naive and unprepared to deal with life. Statistically speaking directly toward the issue of divorce, by the year 2010 it is projected that 70% of couples will be divorced. Now this means that divorce doesn’t make you a failure at relationships, it simply makes you just like everyone else.

The question that is interestingly proposed by Dodson is “How do you think that you are going to stay married when you get married?” Now, alot of us throw out ideas like “God is at the center of our relationship” or “work through my baggage before we get married.” But to these things Dodson has a challenging response “Dont you think that these 70% already had thought of those things as well?” Clearly, it is a HUGE disservice to Christians and Non-Christians alike to buy the belief that we know something that divorced people dont.

This idea of commitment isn’t something that is solely isolated to marriage either. For those of you who remember my blog on living life, I reference Dr. Irwin, whose book talks about success in the work place being centered around the idea of commitment.  Irwin points out that there is skill involved with success in the workplace. And this skill is not simply knowing and executing your roll well; it is extrapolated further to being committed to your dreams, your integrity and your ideals within your work life. He points on the the same notion that many of us are simply naive, or maybe we can call it unintentional when dealing with our work life. He argues that the trick, much like in marriage, its intentional commitment.

Adding to this idea, Dodson argues that as a culture, us twenty-somethings are missing something. We dont know what real commitment looks like. In a world where over half of our parents use their marriages to show us that you dont have to do what you promise you will do, our reality of commitment is skewed. Instead of saying that we will do something and ACTUALLY DOING IT, our words seem to be closer to the statement “I want to will to do that.” (I know, you might have to read that one a few times to get it. )And even beyond wanting to commit to something, it’s completely natural for us twenty-somethings to say to one another “I meant that when I said it, but things have changed and I dont mean it now.I wanted to mean it forever, but I’m sorry I dont.”

“Well, I meant it when I said it…”

My point can clearly be seen in the new Sex and the City Movie (ok, I know half of you men are rolling your eyes, and although I agree that this TV show may have been inappropriate, it did make major social headway in terms of sexuality and equality for women…but that’s another blog). I loved the movie. But the part that got me, was one of the characters, Samantha. She is against marriage. She is against commitment. She is forward about believing that the most important relationship is with yourself. And that message is clear when she leaves her long term, live-in boyfriend when she realizes that she hasn’t FELT happy in months. He stood by her during cancer. Things got hard and ugly. Her friends encouraged her to leave. And the part that was so blatant was what she said to him…

“I’m just going to go ahead and say what you arent supposed to say. Its not that I dont love you… its just that I love me MORE…”

Shocking. I hated that part of the story. I felt like it was mixed messages. On the one hand, you had story lines saying “Love will conquer all” as could be seen in the love shared both by Carrie and Big and Steve and Miranda. And if the message was that love was enough, it seemed backward to me that her same friends would encourage Samantha to leave Smith when she no longer felt happy.

I suppose the message was supposed to be “love yourself,” but I wasn’t ok with that.  I’ve obviously never been married, and maybe I’m the wrong person to be asking, but from what I hear, relationships arent supposed to be about you and your happiness. They are backward, like everything else God created. They work when you DONT worry about yourself. They work when you die to yourself, and commit to forever. And in the words of Patrick Dodson, when you are really thinking in a long term mindset, like of your children’s children, one shitty day is only that. Its just one shitty day. It passes. Even shitty years are just that, just time. They pass. But in the face of 100 years, it changes your prospective.

Ok, so how do we beat our daunting statistic?

Its right there staring us in the face, the reality that MOST of us won’t make it.  Its like in the movie Patch Adams with Robin Williams, when the students are in Medical School. The professor says to them “Look to your left and look to your right.  ONE of the people you just looked at won’t make it.”

I love how Ben concludes his blog. He points out that we dont just wake up as married people, fantastic at commitment. We have to practice it. (I know this thought blew my mind too). WE HAVE TO PRACTICE IT. We have to begin looking at the things in our life like practice to being committed. Committed to marriage, to our jobs, to our children. We have to stay committed to good friends when they start making crappy-ass decisions. We have to start being committed to our jobs. This means showing up everyday, ready to do 100%. Not calling in sick when we just want a personal day. It means driving an hour each way to take your little Catholic grandma to mass because you told her you would. It means being inconvenienced. It means being late. It means being broke sometimes. But above all, this means doing what we say, not just what we think we want to do. It means shedding our naivety, and not thinking “that will never happen to me.” but rather changing our game plan to say “that’s going to be me unless I do something radical about it!”

I dont know about you, but it sounds good on paper. The more that I have read over and edited this piece, the more I realize that this subject is really easy to simply sit in my safe single-woman- world and type to other people….married people. I do love the idea of commitment, but there’s still a part of me that is twenty-something, and gets freaked out. I feel confined. And I like the Samantha’s dating mantra; that life is really all about me feeling happy.   But there is another part of me that continues to say what I have said before “Anything worth having is going to eventually ask something of us.” So I suppose I need to learn to take my own advice – and start looking for places to practice being committed.