Commitment, it's not just for 'R'elationships, anymore

"Now in my younger days I used to sport a shag...." Pharcyde, Passin Me By 1993

Perhaps this was the hip-hop generations answer to F. Scott Fitzgerald seminal opening of, "In my younger and more vulnerable years."  Well, in my younger and more vulnerable years, I liked girls.  I could name them all, but how emabarrsing would it be with search engine technology, if Kelly Parmisohn (to whom I may have had the courage to utter but a few sentences in all of those years)  found her way to my witless ramblings whilst conducting a random Google search. It's not the names that are important, anyhow. Just know that there were girls and they were liked.  

I figured that barring any catastrophe, one day I'd find a girl who didn't think that it was odd that I knew every word to most songs, in most genres, written from 1985-2000. As I searched for this girl (another blog for another time), I began to learn about relationships-- neigh, Relationships. The big 'R' variety. The good, the bad, and the infuriating.  

There was no preparation for this education.  My guy friends never told me, though we spent hours talking about girls-- the idea of girls as it turned out.  My female friends (and there were many) must have been as clueless as I. Either that, or they were practicing some sort of masochism by proxy. I was allowed to fall headlong and heart-first into, what Princess Bridian terminology would describe as, 'the pit of despair'. 

But this blog entry isn't about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. It's the opposite, in a sense.  From the time we actually do have a partner, we are faced with the construct of commitment.  The big 'R' variety of relationships in our western society seems to, at least back in the stone-ages when it mattered to me, yearn for a definition.  That definition commitment and we are all somewhere in it's orbit. The (sometimes) dreaded 'C' word. 

The progression from yearning to find companionship, just to deal with your own (or another's) commitment issues are as ironic as a 33 year-old barista with a mustache, wearing his girlfriends jeans. This brand of supposed fear of committment, however, is documented.  It may come as a surprise to a big 'R' neophyte, but we've done a good job pressing this particular butterfly and preserving it for all to see.

So why are we here, you ask ( I know I am, five paragraphs later).  Because I had a realization this morning.    Though it took a bit of work, I found myself quite capable of committing myself the the big 'R'.  There was a time when I railed on about societal constructs and natural ways of being, blah blah blah, but that was some dumb kid who I would scarcely recognize in 2011. Now I'm faced with the shocking discovery that I woke up today and realized that somehow many of my little 'r' relationships have been consumed by my unspoken, unacknowledged fears. My commitment to music, physical fitness, and writing to name a few.  These are lifelong relationships that I have allowed to grow cold and distant.  

Writing and I are at the breakfast table, reading separate sections of the paper in silence; neither of us knows what went wrong.  Music sleeps on the couch most nights, uninterested in what might happen upstairs.  Fitness and I, at least have an occasional physical thing going on, that is mutually gratifying, but we used to do it every day.  We couldn't get enough.  In the morning, at lunch, after work...we were insatiable.

I've not written anything that wasn't for work in so long, that my process is gone.  I've forgotten favorite colors and flowers,  and every birthday and anniversary for years.  Unstated resentment permeates the air.  Our narrative has gone stale like the breakfast toast, but neither of us notice.  Today though, I'm bringing home, more than symbolic, flowers.  We will take a long walk at sunset and begin to figure out what happened to us.  

So welcome me to this world of blogging.  I never thought it would come to this, but we have to spice things up.  I'm hoping when I get home, you'll be there wrapped in Saran Wrap, or nothing at all!