Commitment.

I have commitment issues. I haven’t always had them; they developed to 100% fruition somewhere between my current relationship and the relationship prior to that. I haven’t yet put my finger on exactly why they developed (for the record, I don’t place the blame on anyone else) but sometimes, when the commitment issues rear their disfigured head I can’t help but try again to fully figure it out…usually to no avail. Although, today I may have hit upon a piece of the puzzle.

Today, in what began as a joking sort of funny conversation, an innocent remark was made that made my brain spin a little. It happened so fast that I didn’t really process it at all until I was on the way home on the bus (at a training this week and it’s just easier to avoid driving and spending a million dollars on parking downtown). It all started out during lunch while walking by the KCJ (King County Jail)…apparently it was their hour of ‘yard’ time; I learned this because I remarked about how it was possible that I could hear inmates whooping and yelling. Then I mentioned how glad I was that I had never done anything to land myself in jail. Then I took it further and mentioned how funny I thought it would be if my companion at the time ever had to actually bail me out of jail for something. Then he said that he hoped that if that was the case it would happen before we were married.

Wait. Just, a, minute…is what my brain did.

My mouth did better than my brain because I just asked why that would make a difference and the conversation went on from there.

To fast forward from there (through many poorly drawn stick figures and such for the training that we’re doing) I revisited the conversation on the bus. Specifically I mused about my silent emotional reaction to it. Then I started thinking about all the significant relationships that I’d had. Specifically for some reason I thought about how healthy or unhealthy each relationship was in relation to my level of commitment to it (really instead of commitment, at the time I was thinking about how much I felt I needed the relationship/person at the time I was relating to them). An interesting correlation took shape in my brain. It is best demonstrated in graph form:

I think this makes me look crazy…but let me explain if I may.

I took all of the relationships that I consider significant as far as longevity, closeness, etc. and gave them all two different number values (scores, if you will). One score represented the level of how healthy I felt the relationship was/is; 1 being incredibly unhealthy and 10 being significantly healthy. The other score represented the level of need I felt for that person/relationship; 1 being the most unhealthy level of need ever and 10 being a feeling of not “need”ing at all (as clarification, in the brain of Kelly “need” = “unhealthy”). If I really wanted to delve deep into the motivations of my relationships with people I could have labeled “perception of need” as “codependent” (on my part at least), but anyway…

As you can see it starts out representing a relationship where I felt I needed the person sort of a lot and therefore the relationship was fairly unhealthy (for details I won’t go into here). It improves some with the second relationship where the level of need felt was not high at all and the relationship was fairly healthy (in terms of how someone treated me, honesty, etc.). Something important I need to add here…though the relationship was fairly healthy my level of commitment to it was not very healthy and not very high (come to think of it I should have added that line to the graph too, but oh well). Then you can see that it dips a bit with the next one in terms of both needing the person more and the unhealthy nature of the relationship. Then the outlier appears in the data and his name is George. That isn’t something that needs to be detailed at this time. Suffice to say I was malfunctioning at the time and felt that I needed him in order to breathe and the relationship was terrible…but eventually I got over this.

The rest of the data steadily improves and eventually demonstrates how I feel about my current relationship. It’s very healthy in terms of trust, kindness, friendship, love and all that stuff. In fact I can honestly state that I have never been treated better by anyone else. But the commitment thing still causes my internal thoughts to go a little haywire. After making a crazy relationship graph I think I understand why.

As we’ve already discussed my brain equates need with unhealthy because when I think of need I think of codependent, which has clearly been an issue for me in the past. Intellectually I realize that the most important part is “wanting” someone (for a myriad of different reasons) but this is where I get screwed up.

I don’t trust my sense of “want” and I think that’s where the problem lies. Having been used to operating on a “need” basis and then getting to a point where I vehemently throw that out the window after a number of poor experiences (one in particular) I’m just not used to basing commitment on “wanting” to do it. I don’t trust myself.

And I remain unsure of how to get to the point where I fully do.