Committment Phobia

Planning a Shabbaton, or more accurately a small weekend getaway with a handful of friends, made me realize how commitment-phobic people can be. I get it, life happens; things are going on, and people need to be able to flake. I know I don't like to schedule things for a few months out, because at this stage in the game I'm always secretly hoping that my life is going to be infinitely different in a few months, that there will be someone in my life who I will want to spend all my time with and change all my plans for.

Samuel Decker Thompson said it perfectly, "We are all just a car crash, a diagnosis, an unexpected phone call, a newfound love or broken heart away from becoming a completely different person."

Even so, the Shabbaton I'm working on isn't months out, it's a few days away. Something that everyone, myself included, can work on is realizing that plans can be changed in the event of an emergency or something grandly more important. Even if it costs a little extra money, emotional energy, whatever, not making decisions isn't always safety, you can lose out on so much. Not making a decision is making a decision too.

This is true in relationships, but this is also true with committing to most things. Relationships are probably the quintessential example though. It's about being resistant to change, to not being able to look ahead and make decisions for your future.

If you aren't familiar with Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese, a parable about how different personalities deal with change, here's a link to a summary video. It's worth the 3 minutes.

Sniff and Scurry find their way to the new cheese (whatever it is that is valuable and your goal in life), while Hem and Haw, well, hem and haw. Haw learns valuable lessons along the way, while we don't know what happens to Hem.

There's so much less on the line committing to, or backing out of, a Shabbaton, than what's at stake when we're talking relationships. Relationship anxiety a lot of the time is rooted in fear of emotional intimacy or stems from previous bad relationship experiences. Not being able to make choices in general can have many other causes. Sometimes it's really just a heavy duty case of FOMO (I'm not kidding). People may not commit to one thing, because they are always wondering what else they may be missing out on. Sometimes people have a hard time with decisions, because they're codependent and they're always trying to figure out what the other person wants and have convinced themselves that they don't have a preference. Sometimes it's much deeper rooted, and the person probably should speak to a professional who can help him/her get to the bottom of it.

With all that said, I'm going to toot my own horn for a moment and say that in the end we rounded up enough people to make the Shabbaton happen (financially worthwhile and all that) and worked out destination/location/property all in just a few days. I should get one of those tshirts that say, "I make things happen. What's your superpower?"

Seriously though, I think the more invested someone is in something, the more s/he can make decisions to make it happen. The less s/he cares about it (even if s/he's lying to himself that s/he really does care...actions not words), the less s/he will take a hard look at why s/he's having a hard time committing.