On Being a Commitment-Phobe

A phobia is defined as, "A persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it" (Webster's Dictionary). I therefore, suffer from commitmentphobia. Look it up. Wikipedia mentions it.

I have this very irrational fear of commitment and being tied to a specific thing or job or activity, and so I move around frequently. To avoid commitment to Utah, I leave every couple of weeks. I can't commit to finish school early because I have things I want to do -- extravagant vacations and the like, if you will. I can't commit to relationships or houses, marathons or rock concerts. I hate the idea of commitment for some strange, crazy reason.

The problem is that life requires commitment. Sort of a big problem, right? We commit to an education, to a career, to a faith, a political ideology, or a significant other. All these are essential to finding meaning and purpose in our life. Does a life of commitmentphobia mean a life void of meaning?

I am, however, working on overcoming this phobia. Despite being a nomadic gypsy person, I have successfully decided to commit to a job in Provo that will further my career opportunities. I have planned to finish school on time, which requires staying in Utah starting in April of next year. I have committed to a plan of action for my life after that. I have a five year plan. Finally, I am committed to something.

Commitmentphobia stems, I think, from an inability to make decisions. It's a great trial in life to not be able to make decisions. Making decisions is part of life and when we are indecisive, we try to cop out of living by delegating the decision making process to someone else. We are afraid to make the wrong decision. In our futile attempt to please everyone, we become useless to the very being we need -- ourselves. Our life becomes nothing more than what other people want from us. Nothing is ever what we want.

This is not to say that we should be self-interested, atomistic, individualistic beings. That's a terrible, awful idea. It is to say that to overcome the plague of commitmentphobia, we must do things for ourselves, things that we want to do and not things that others want us to do.

Perhaps, commitmentphobia does create a life devoid of meaning -- personal meaning. Psychiatrist Victor Frankl wrote, "A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes -- within the limits of endowment and environment -- he has made out of himself...Man has both [positive and negative] potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions."

Let us then make the decision to be a man and not a thing. Let us shed our commitmentphobia.