On Committed Relationships

During a casual chat with a great friend, the issue of love and commitment surfaced the conversation. Although I tried my best to convey a clear message, it was impossible not to get bogged down in a mass of quandaries. This is my letter of clarification.

The talk we had the other night was initially not my way of baring my soul to you and put the cards on the table, it was simply a conversation in which we could exchange our own musings on the different flavors of personal relationships and the ones we found more tasteful. In passing, however, I ended up admitting that I see intellectual discrepancies in the labeling of committed relationships and the people who integrate these. You nodded in agreement (if not perplexity) to my every word. Either 1) I was astonishingly persuasive, or 2) you and I were on the same page right from the get-go. 3) Or maybe you hated each incendiary idea that came out of my mouth but were too nice to stop me on my tracks and put out the fires I had set. 

I think the following compendium will do some justice to my admissions that night:

Relationships shouldn’t be about keeping to socially constructed labels. If A likes B and B likes A, they should be free to spend time and experiment with each other without having to worry about what people might think of them.

Faithfulness in a committed relationship shouldn’t be the product of A limiting his/herself so as to please B, it should be the result of A finding B so attractive, interesting, and lovely that A's eyes won’t care to avert from B's.  It should be about A finding everything she/he needs in B and therefore deeming it useless to search for anything in X, Y and Z.

I think commitments of the sort in discussion here invite a variety of hypocrisies. If A is in a committed relationship with B, but happens to find C more attractive than B, it is necessary that A lies or at least hides this from B to avoid trouble and to stay in line with the established commitment. Hence we’ll keep the relationship in play but at the cost of B being kept in the dark regarding A’s true feelings and desires.  Or A could simply break the commitment at anytime and leave B only to run into the arms of C, in which case we’d avoid the hypocrisy and insincerity of withholding our true sentiments from our partner but at the expense of losing all intelligible use for a commitment in the first place.

What I propose is simple label-less transparency. This way, if A is with B, B will know for certain that A is not just trying to keep with an established commitment, but that A in fact enjoys being with B.  The moment A finds C overall more appealing than B (not that this will necessarily happen), there will be no need for A to conceal such findings from B. Because the burden of a commitment is not afoot, A will be free to seek the realization of his/her emotional needs in C without having to lie to B. And B will immediately know that A has changed his/her mind and will thus not be wasting his/her time with A.  In other words, if the interests of A and B legitimately converge, i.e., if A and B have in fact true feelings of mutual affection, desire, admiration, respect, etc., then a vowed commitment will add nothing interesting, if at all to said courtship. If the aforementioned emotions are not mutual or simply do not exist period, then even a sworn commitment won’t be of any use.

The essence of a courtship is the affection shared out of one’s own volition. Not the conditional behavior performed in order to stay true to the pressure of a label such as ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, and ‘committed relationship’.

You’ll have to excuse my deliberate elision of the word “love”. I happen to believe that such word has been rendered unintelligible by the vernacular use of it as a suitcase term.  If one can “love” one’s mother, one’s girlfriend, one’s cat, eating ice cream, and cooking meatballs, the word “love” then has been successfully diluted to insignificance.