Whatever Happened to Commitment?

Commentary

On a walk recently, my married daughter asked whether my husband and I had ever considered divorce during the difficult times in our marriage.

It didn’t take me a heartbeat to answer.

“No.”

Not because there weren’t difficult times. There were. But when we married 44 years ago, we made a decision: Divorce was not an option.

That decision changed the questions we asked when things got hard. We weren’t asking whether we should leave. We weren’t developing exit strategies. We were asking how we were going to work it out.

I grew up with a definition of commitment that I have never forgotten: Commitment is doing what you said you would do long after the feeling with which you said it is gone.

Lately, I have been wondering whether we are losing that understanding—not only in marriage but in our families, friendships, and perhaps even in the way we live together as a society.

There are marriages that should end. Abuse, addiction, chronic infidelity, abandonment, and other destructive behaviors can make leaving necessary. The same is true of family relationships. No adult child should be expected to endure abuse or danger simply because the person causing it is a parent.

Sometimes, leaving is an act of survival.

But difficult is not the same as destructive.

That distinction matters.

No-fault divorce is often blamed for the dramatic increase in divorce during the latter half of the 20th century. The research tells a more complicated story. Easier divorce did increase divorce rates for a time, but it also gave people trapped in dangerous marriages a way out. Studies have associated unilateral divorce laws with declines in female suicide and domestic violence.

That was an important freedom.

But the freedom to leave and the wisdom to know when to leave are not the same thing.

Divorce remains consequential, particularly for children. Recent research following more than 5 million U.S. children found that parental divorce is associated with significant disadvantages later in life. The reasons are complex and include falling household income, moving more often, and parents living farther apart.

The point is not that unhappy couples should be forced to stay together. It is that leaving has consequences, too.

And I wonder whether, as leaving became easier legally and more accepted culturally, we also began losing something valuable: the expectation that relationships worth saving are sometimes worth struggling for.

I see echoes of that question in another phenomenon: “going no contact.”

An estimate recently cited by The Wall Street Journal suggests that roughly one in 10 Americans is estranged from a parent or child at any given time. Some of those estrangements involve circumstances in which separation is clearly necessary. But research has also found differences in values to be a significant predictor of estrangement between parents and their adult children.

That raises a question worth asking ourselves:

How much difference are we willing to tolerate in someone we love?

Several years ago, I met a young woman at a writers’ conference who asked me to mentor her. I agreed, and we began meeting regularly to talk about her writing and her book.

Then one day, she posted on Facebook that she was cutting off contact with anyone who had voted for Donald Trump.

What struck me was not her politics. It was the principle.

A vote had become a test for continued human relationship.

This woman knew me. We had talked together, worked together, and shared an interest in writing. Yet one political choice could apparently render all of that irrelevant.

When did disagreement become disqualification?

A successful marriage requires us to share our lives with someone who is not us. That sounds ridiculously obvious, yet it may be one of the most important lessons that marriage teaches.

My husband does not think exactly as I do. I do not think exactly as he does. Over 44 years, we have disagreed, irritated each other, disappointed each other, misunderstood each other, and undoubtedly changed each other.

That is not evidence that the marriage failed.

It is evidence that two different human beings were married.

Families demand much the same thing. Parents are imperfect. So are their children. We say things badly. We misunderstand motives. We carry different values into different generations. We make mistakes that we wish we could take back.

Love does not eliminate those differences. Commitment gives us a reason to work through them.

And the ability to live with difference matters beyond our homes.

A free society cannot function very well if we are capable of living only with people who vote like us, worship like us, think like us, or share every one of our beliefs about the world.

We don’t have to abandon our convictions to remain in a relationship with someone whose convictions are different. Perhaps the greater test of conviction is being able to hold it firmly without requiring everyone we love to hold it too.

There is wisdom in knowing when a relationship has become so destructive that we must leave.

But there is another kind of wisdom that we may be in danger of losing: knowing when to stay.

Staying means doing the harder work—listening when we would rather defend ourselves, apologizing when pride tells us not to, forgiving what can be forgiven, changing what needs to be changed, and making room for another imperfect human being.

Something important happens in that work.

We grow.

A marriage that works its way through a difficult season is not simply the same marriage on the other side. We learn where the relationship is vulnerable and what it takes to protect it. Having weathered one storm together, we may be better prepared for the next.

Families can grow this way, too.

There is reason for hope. One national study found that many parent–child estrangements eventually ended. In later surveys, 81 percent of those who had been estranged from their mothers and 69 percent of those estranged from their fathers were no longer estranged.

Rupture does not have to become permanent.

My husband and I have been married for 44 years, but we did not build a 44-year marriage on our wedding day.

We built it year by year, disagreement by disagreement, forgiveness by forgiveness, through good seasons and difficult ones.

That is why I answered my daughter so quickly.

No.

We weren’t looking for a way out.

We were looking for a way through.

And each time we found one, we knew a little more about how to find the next.

Maybe commitment is understanding that some of the most valuable things in our lives become valuable precisely because we stayed long enough—and worked hard enough—to build them.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.