Fear of Commitment

Yesterday I was reading an article in Time Magazine about the fact that home ownership is no longer a sound investment and that renting is more common now than ever before. I began to turn this over in my mind and play with the notion that we are no longer a nation of home owners and it took me to an interesting theory. What if the reason that home ownership is down has to do with a generation plagued by commitment phobia? If you think about it for a moment you will begin to see that our generation is absolutely, one hundred percent afraid of commitment.

I can completely relate to this. If you look at my life you will see this common fear pop up in several areas. The first one I always notice is my career history. I have had several different types of employment. From teaching, to being a nanny, to working at a college, I have been in all kinds of different jobs. I don’t know if I just get bored, or if there is more to it, but I tend to get restless. I have almost been at my current job for two years and I can feel the itch to move on to the next, but I am trying to hold out and stay with it. I don’t know why I can’t seem to commit beyond that, but in my job I have always found myself looking for the next thing.

The other area where I see a fear to commit is in personal relationships with the opposite sex. I don’t know why it is that I can’t find a guy that I feel comfortable enough with that I would want to be in a long term relationship with him. I know that I am not alone in this. Every day I see people getting together and breaking up. I see people who confess love get married and divorced within years. Why am I scared to be with someone? The answer is that every day love fails, and I am scared of that happening to me. I’m afraid that I will make the wrong choice, and I will be left alone.

My generation is constantly moving on to the next thing. We look for it in fashion, television, job satisfaction and relationships. So the fact that we can’t commit to a house doesn’t really surprise me. I wonder, sometimes, at what point we will decide that it’s time to settle down into a life and not have the desire to move on so quickly. I know that I want the best life that I can possibly have, and maybe there is a part of me that has bought into the thought that life is supposed to be a certain way, and if what I have going on doesn’t fit into that idea, then I haven’t been successful. I want to know that I am not just part of a generation unsatisfied, but I want to be the type of person who doesn’t fear commitment.

I don’t know how to get past this fear. I don’t want to buy into this generational curse, but sometimes I find it hard to get on the other side of it. Maybe one day, I will be able to break through it, but at the same time, I am afraid that the fear of commitment is something that I am still working on overcoming.