Against Commitment
If you love someone, set them free
Yesterday was my 20th anniversary1 with my wife. If you ask most people, they’ll say that to make it that long takes things like sacrifice, effort, and above all, commitment. I completely disagree. As longtime readers know, I’m not a fan of commitment. I strongly prefer setting expectations to making commitments.
When I talk about commitments, I’m talking about promises, and in particular, long-term promises that partners make to one another. The prominent therapist and attachment researcher Stan Tatkin suggests that people in relationships make promises such as “I will never leave you,” “Our relationship is more important than… any other competing value,” or “You will be the first to hear about anything.” Marriage is often considered the ur-example of relationship commitment, where parties promise to stay together, to love and support one another, for better or for worse, until death.2
My problem with commitment is the same as my problem with relationship rules:
[Rules] are only for situations in which we don't trust our in-the-moment judgment. If we trust our judgment, it's far better to make the decision as late as possible, so we make the decision at the moment when we have the most information. Things (including our needs and desires) could have changed in the meantime, we may have additional information, or we may just be in a situation that we didn't anticipate. If we are able to exercise good judgment, we will make better decisions if we refrain from making our decisions in advance (by making rules)….
I don't have rules in my relationships because I prefer to only have close relationships with people whose judgment I can trust when it comes to making decisions about what they are going to do. When I feel the impulse to make a rule or agreement, I take that as an indication that I'm feeling distrustful, and explore that. Most of the time, I find that if I adequately express my desires or expectations, the mistrustful feeling goes away, but sometimes it is indicative of a bigger issue.
Basically, making a commitment is a way of making a decision before the actual decision point. I think doing this a week in advance is silly, but the idea of making a commitment that’s intended to last multiple decades seems nuts to me. Your world will almost certainly look completely different then. You might be a completely different person. Your partner(s) will probably be completely different. This is why nearly all modern jurisdictions allow no-fault divorce - it’s a tacit admission that Shit Happens and we’re not going to enforce lifelong commitments.
Commitments also presuppose that one or more parties are going to want to break the commitment and should be discouraged from doing so. If all parties were confident that everyone would Do The Thing regardless of the commitment, there would be no point in making it. The act of making the commitment is saying that if any of us are in a situation where we want to act inconsistently with the commitment, we shouldn’t do that and should instead stick to the commitment. We should sacrifice what we want in order to accomplish whatever goal the commitment is serving. I’m against this because I think people in relationships should do whatever they want as much of the time as possible, and I don’t like putting barriers in place to interfere with that. The last thing I want is my partner sacrificing her happiness or well-being because she made a commitment and feels bad breaking it.
Sometimes making commitments is unavoidable. Unless you’re wealthy, you probably need to get a 30-year mortgage to buy a house. Having a child is a lifelong commitment except in rare circumstances. Various financial decisions require long-term planning. If I’m going to pick you up at the airport, it makes sense to commit to it since you need to be able to rely on the fact that I’ll be there. These can all be reasonable commitments to make because there’s really no other way to get the benefits you want without the commitment. But when it comes to relationship commitments, particularly about emotional topics, there is an alternative that captures most of the upside of commitments while minimizing the downsides - setting expectations.
We set expectations by predicting our behavior or desires. Instead of making a promise, we instead make a prediction. Rather than “I will never leave you” it’s “I don’t think I’ll ever want to leave you.” Rather than agreeing to be exclusive, it’s “I’m not interested in dating anyone else, and I don’t think that will change.”
The important differences between commitments and predictions are (a) predictions have much less of a moral dimension to them; and (b) predictions have uncertainty built in. As a commenter on the Morethantwo blog put it:
In my experience, there isn’t much of a difference until someone actually breaks or challenges the rule. Then the difference is kind of huge. When you break a rule, you betray the other person or the relationship. In the aftermath, there is a clear moral victor, and there is a clear power differential. The “thumb on the scale,” the “just in case,” I believe speaks to this power differential. In case of emergency, let’s be really really clear who is wrong. In other words when you do something hurtful or disruptive, I need shame on my side in order to bring you back.
The shame is a necessary part of the commitment process. Part of the reason commitments work is that there is a strong psychological disincentive (in the form of shame or guilt) to breaking them.
There’s also the question of certainty. It’s no coincidence that my examples above of commitments are absolute statements and the predictions are hedged. Commitments require certainty. The whole point of making commitments is to give people certainty. The problem is that the world is uncertain! The longer-term a commitment is, the less certain it is that all parties will continue to be served by the commitment, and the less certain it is that they will actually stick to it (just google divorce statistics if you don’t believe me). By contrast, predictions are inherently uncertain. When you make a prediction, all parties understand that you’re reasoning under uncertainty and you could be wrong. And hopefully all parties understand that making a mistaken prediction isn’t a reason to feel guilt or shame. It’s just a reason to try to get better at making predictions.
My wife and I stay together not because of any commitment we made, but because we wake up every day thankful for one another and strongly wanting to be together. Whenever I bring this up, people try to tell me that you can’t really have a relationship that way, and that long-term relationships inevitably require a commitment to stay together. But I just celebrated my 20-year anniversary, and I predict(!) that we’ll have at least 20 more, so I don’t think I really need to listen to those people.
of when we started dating. We spent a while unmarried for financial reasons, so our dating anniversary is the much more meaningful one to us
by contrast, my wedding vows were something like “hey, we really like each other and would like to stay together for the foreseeable future”