I think commitments are overrated. There, I said it. This horrible ill my ex has said about me is true: I don’t keep my promises; I give up.
This is a new development. For most of my life, I was totally hoodwinked with the idea of seeing things through, being true to ones’ word, never giving up. I stayed in band all the way through high school because I’d decided to try it out as an eleven-year-old, so I’d made the commitment. Despite hating swimming practice, I kept doing it till a school counselor realized how depressing I found it and removed me from the class. I worked at Outback Steakhouse as a hostess for two years, plugging along under the promise that if I waited long enough, I’d be promoted to a server. In the meantime, I was the one they turned to when someone had clogged a toilet in the women’s room.
I believed divorce was a sin, and that I should do everything in my power to make my marriage work, including killing myself bending over backwards to please a man who is impossible to please. To do anything less was to be forsworn.
Our society has a vested interest in molding us to be the kind of people who stay in dead-end jobs, and who stay in dead-end marriages. Everything is more stable that way. Change, chaos, those things are expensive. If someone realizes their workplace is taking advantage of their labor and they could make more money elsewhere, and they leave their job, that creates hitches in productivity and revenue. If someone realizes their spouse is actually the worst and initiates a divorce, that adds another money- and time-consuming case to the family courts. Wouldn’t it be much more convenient if we were all steady little worker bees who stayed out after work to avoid our marital problems? And so this fear of being labeled a quitter makes sense as a means of keeping us that way—keeping us in order.
Having quit my marriage, what I’ve realized is this: keeping commitments that aren’t serving you is a way of putting yourself in chains. It is narrowing your present and future possibilities based on the ideals of the past. But what if your present self has different ideals? What if they see things more clearly than your past self? Honestly—how could your present self not see things more clearly than your past self? Everyone knows: hindsight is 20/20.
I would not have made the promise to be forever faithful to my ex had I known how he would treat me as time went on. Therefore, I don’t find that promise to be all that binding. I’m glad I quit. Had I kept slogging away under the promise I’d made when I was a doe-eyed 18-year-old, I would never have been able to be so in-tune with my present self as I am now.
I think it’s invaluable to be able to look at your situation and say, “Yes, I know I said I would do this, but I see now it’s not in my best interest to follow through.” Don’t be held back by the chains of your past. Dare to break free.
Yes. It’s important to learn the value of renegotiating commitments when they no longer serve us. Integrity is important too. I try not to make commitments that I can’t keep. I take them seriously. Sometimes it takes courage to make these decisions.
Nothing wrong with being a quitter. I wrote my thoughts on this subject here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/kentpeterson/p/im-a-quitter?r=txq7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web