Why people keep commitments?

I think we should not equate staying with someone with keeping one’s commitment to someone.

People stay together, in marriage for instance, for reasons as many and complicated as there are people, none of them being pure devotion to the duty of keeping a commitment.

Some people just get used to each other. They don’t have surprises for each other. 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, how he takes his clothes off and when he is likely to make love. He does not unsettle anyone with odd questions, changed opinions, or unpredicted feelings. Like the couple in the New Yorker cartoon: “I know what she is going to say. She knows what I’m going to say. So we just don’t bother.” Boring. Yes, but settling too. And boring settledness wears better than the excitement of never knowing what is coming next. Not a lot of moral grit here…just putting up with what you’ve gotten used to because it’s too much nuisance to get used to somebody else.

Some people stay around because what they have is not as bad as what could be out there.

I know a woman who, after being married to him for twenty years, discovered that her husband was gay. Not a hundred percent, dyed-in-the-wool gay, but gay enough to make him ambivalent about his sexual preference. He is afraid to leave her. She is afraid to let him go. She has no job skills. He is a good person, gentle, devoutly loving, even though he cannot love her the way she desires to be loved. So she stays.

If we cannot give her much credit for commitment, and maybe even question her choice, let us at least say that she is surrendering some of her desires for the sake of some of his needs.

I know a minister who is married to a shrew who grew up as the daughter of a prima donna on the Baptist stage and thought she was marrying an even bigger star when she caught Chuck. But Chuck was not called to clerical celebrity, and their early infatuation has wilted into a tedious and tired toleration. Chuck hates the whole scene. But he has face to save, and a pension besides. If he gets a divorce, he will lose his job and his reputation for straight-line moral orthodoxy to boot.

So he sticks with what he is stuck with. Don’t give him an A for commitment, but don’t demand that everyone keep commitments only out of unambivalent moral motives.

Other people are simply trapped. I know a talented lady who has multiple sclerosis—and a husband who brutalizes her in various subtle fashions. I think she would leave in a minute, but she can’t get away because she cannot afford to go anywhere.

Give her sympathy and some help if you can, but don’t confuse her staying with commitment; give her credit for resisting a temptation to put arsenic in his coffee.

People keep real commitments, too, for many reasons.

People who keep a high quality of commitment do not do it merely out of conscious obligation to a vow they once made. It is for other, more person-directed reasons. It seems to me, in truth, that most commitment keepers are not sticking with what they are stuck with simply because they remember that once upon a time they made a promise. They have other reasons.

Let me mention some.

People keep commitments because they care about the people they are committed to. This came to me one afternoon while I was visiting my mother in the hospital. She had broken her hip for the second time, and I, being on some business in Michigan, had my afternoons free for long talks with her just a couple of weeks, as it turned out, before she died.

My mother, I must tell you, left her home in Friesland at age twenty-one with a dreamer of a husband, to pursue the American dream with the countless other European emigrants in the early days of our century. Her husband, my father, stayed with her for eleven years and then, at age thirty-two, died and went to heaven, leaving his wife with five children and not five dollars to care for them with. She was just thirty-one, no money, no social security, no relatives, and no job skills. It was tough going. As I got older I wondered about her in a way that children seldom wonder about their parents. Did this woman, this lonely, needy woman of such intense feeling, never long for a male in her life?

So I asked her, and felt, when I did, as though I had barged into someone’s sacred privacy, off-limits to sons. “Mother, you were a good looking woman, and you must have been terribly lonely. You had a right to some happiness. Didn’t you ever long for a man, maybe someone who would marry you?”

She answered quickly as if she had been waiting a long time for someone to ask. “Yes,” she said, “I wanted a man, but I was afraid that if I took a man he would not love my children, and I cared too much for them to take the risk.”

I don’t think she ever thought about having taken a vow to take care of her kids. Never prided herself, anymore than a lioness would pride herself in her loyalty to her pride of cubs. She just cared for us enough to stick with what she was stuck with at considerable cost to her own desires for fulfillment.

Her commitment was the child of her care, which is a far cry from the true grit of stubborn loyalty to a vow.

People also keep commitments because they feel that they belong to the people they are committed to.

We establish relationships with some people who cleave to us like a vine twisting its branches around the trunk of a tree for so long that you cannot separate tree from vine. They belong to us, and belonging is reason enough for staying.

Albert Camus’s The Plague is about belonging and commitment. The people of the town of Oran knew that 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. It was not long before a thousand persons were dying every week. So the town was quarantined; nobody could get in or out.

Dr. Bernard Rieux was caught in the plague, just like everyone else. And it never occurred to him to try to get out of town, even though he would have liked to join his wife who was a patient at a resort in another town. Dr. Rieux simply figured that he belonged to the town.

But a journalist named Raymond Rambert was caught in Oran, and he wanted to get out more than he wanted anything else. “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, as he tried to make dying a little less horrible for the people, and maybe saving some children. Raymond pitched in, doing whatever a layman could do in such chaos and death.

One day a person-smuggler offered Raymond a chance to get out—for a price. But he surprised Dr. Rieux by refusing to leave.

Stay? Why stay, Rieux asked. Your happiness is waiting for you in Paris. You have a right to be happy. And you certainly cannot be happy here.

Raymond’s answer was: “Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not.” Raymond and Rieux were in the same boat; they were stuck because they belonged.

Most people keep commitments because they have come to feel the mystery of belonging to other people or another person.

Some people fulfill commitments because their own identity is created by the commitment.

A person makes a commitment, and lets it be a birth into a new identity. She is no longer the same person she used to be. She has a new name, God’s name: The One Who Will Be There With You. And thereafter, she simply accepts whatever conditions of living God providentially creates, the way a person lives out her life the best she can once she has been born the person she is. To break the commitment is a little like taking your own life, or at least losing your identity.

There are people who accept the conditions of committed life in this fashion.

I was fascinated by this thought some months ago as I read Dale Cooper’s story of his father, John Cooper. John Cooper married a sturdy, sprightly farm girl named Margie back in 1941 and settled in with Margie in high hopes of becoming the county’s biggest onion grower. But four years later, with two little children in the house, Margie fell victim to polio, and was destined to spend most of the rest of her life in an iron lung. Gone were the payoffs and all the things a man is entitled to in a marriage: no house keeper, no sex partner, no child bearer, no budget balancer.

Gone, too, was the high hope of a big onion farm; you can’t make it big in onion farming when you are spending big chunks of the day taking care of a paralyzed wife.

John and Margie had a fortieth wedding anniversary not too long ago; someone asked him to explain his long devotion.

“I’m a Christian,” he said, “and we try to keep our promises.” But I don’t believe that John spent forty years gritting his teeth in legalistic bondage to a word of promise he had made to Margie. It was not as if he would have ditched her years ago had he only not been stuck to a vow he once spoke in front of a preacher. He could not have been Margie’s laughing, encouraging, uplifting partner if his life was bondage to a promise.

To people like John, a promise is like being born. He did what a person born with a handicap does; he accepted his and Margie’s situation as the condition of his life.

When Margie died his son Dale asked him how he had done what he had done, all those years. “I never even thought about doing anything else. You just do it, and God helps you.”

You just do it. But only if you let your significant commitments be a kind of birth into a new dimension of your reality, so that sticking with what you are stuck with becomes a creative way of becoming your own self.

I have mentioned three reasons why some people keep commitments: (1) they keep commitments because they care about the people they are committed to. (2) They keep commitments because they feel that they belong to the people they are committed to. (3) They keep commitments because a commitment made is like a birth into another stage of their selfhood. In short, people who keep commitments for these reasons tend to think more about the persons they care about and belong to than about their stubborn determination to stick with what they stuck themselves with by a vow spoken in the distant past.

And yet, sometimes, when the whole thing seems to be falling apart, when a person has a lot of good reasons to pack her bags and move on, she may indeed remember that one day, ten years or a lifetime ago, she made a promise. It is as simple as that. She made a promise, and the sheer memory of words spoken before God and a few witnesses tells her that she is committed, and she has to stay. She cannot think of any hopeful reason for staying, not caring, not belonging, she stays simply because she made a promise and is bound to keeping it. This too is why some people keep commitments.

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