Longterm commitment usually means fidelity, constancy, compromise and predictability and let’s face it, that’s not going to appeal to everyone.
Some people prefer to avoid commitment altogether. Really serious cases of ‘commitment aversion’ prefer to call it ‘the C word’, chilling at its very mention. There are lots of reasons for this. Certainly, in some cases, it’s a matter of ‘I haven’t yet met the person I would want to spend the rest of my life with.’
There is an abiding myth in society that a person who is not interested in making a commitment must have something wrong with them. We need to acknowledge that there are some people who, for whatever reason, simply don’t need to have that one ’significant other’ in their lives, being quite happy on their own or preferring their needs to be met by several ’significant others’. Of course, it is possible to make a commitment to more than one person at a time and, if more than one of the relationships is sexual, working out the ground rules and abiding by them can get very tricky.
Somewhere in between the totally uncommitted and the lifelong monogamist is an intriguing group of ’serial monogamists’. These are people who believe in fidelity but have a string of monogamous but short-lived relationships. There is a certain addictive potential in the early phases of a relationship … the ‘in love with falling in love’ syndrome … and making a promise to another person that cuts out the possibility of ever falling in love again might be too great a compromise.
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