I’ve been thinking about Radical Commitment Ryan Breen

I will leave some notes here that might grow into a new article of my own someday:

• The Myth of the Soulmate. It is a mistake to think that there is One — that person who was created by God or something else divine just to love us. It’s very natural to think in these terms, because we all have just One Mother. Just One woman who brought us into this world, on whom we depended upon for our existence. But the Love we needed from our one and singular Mother is not a model for seeking love in our romantic partnerships, in which we are free to choose. Neither God nor Fate nor Nature ordain a partner for us. We must seek that person out ourselves.
• The converse to the Myth of the Soulmate is that Anyone Will Do, which is also false. There are many people on this earth with whom we are emotionally, physically, or intellectually incompatible. We are not obliged to love everyone.
• The danger that exists in opposition to the One is the fallacy that romantic partners are somehow disposable, or fungible. After discarding the Myth of the Soulmate, we may fall into the trap of the Grass Is Always Greener, or the old cliche that “it is easier to make a baby than to raise the dead,” which is meant to encourage people to move on from relationships that are challenging them or creating negative emotions. It’s very tempting to claim, even after years of commitment and growth and moments of bliss, that “we grew apart,” or “we weren’t a good fit for one another after all.” The problem with this approach is that we are so likely to recreate the same patterns of our old failed relationship(s) with a new person, that we get no closer to satisfying or biological need for secure attachment.
• There is another “empowerment” mythology that says you’re better off with no one than with a partner that is less than ideal or is problematic in some important way. We might call this I’m Not Going to Settle, and it’s dangerous garbage. We must all choose the Problem We Are Willing to Live With, because no person and no relationship will meet every legitimate need. My impression of the advice that you must first “learn to love yourself,” or “be OK being alone,” is that it goes against everything our ancient ancestors experienced in their small, tribal communities. Human beings are highly social, interdependent creatures. We are not meant to cloister ourselves away from human contact and attachments. We belong in tribes, and that includes forming romantic and familial relationships with people with whom we can be intimate and vulnerable.
• Although there is no One, there is power in The One I Choose, and this is what radical commitment means to me. Nonetheless, there is something about commitment that is too often overlooked, and that is, “To what are we committing?” We think of Radical Commitment to a person, and it can be that. Allow me to suggest that it must also be to a process. Love is a verb, not a state of emotion. To commit to love a person demands a commitment to act in Love with that person. Given our imperfections, and the fact that we are attracted to those people who remind us of the people in our past who have hurt us, to what sort of verbs are we committing? I think that self-examination, self-reflection, curiosity, empathy, and a willingness to learn and adapt are among the necessary commitments.
• We live in a time for which we are poorly equipped by evolutionary biology to manage the stressors and expectations of modern, industrialized society. There is an epidemic of childhood neglect, if not outright abuse, in the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries. The family structures, the educational and medical institutions, the workplaces in these WEIRD countries — none of them are organized around the needs of the child. They are organized around the needs of the corporation, the bureaucracy, the factory, or some other social problem — anything but the child! As such, the adult populations in WEIRD countries (like the US and our European allies) are increasingly traumatized, not by acute experiences, but by chronic and immutable threats, neglect, and abandonment in childhood that follows them long past the point of sexual maturity. In short, we are all wounded, and we replay our wounding with our romantic partners, seeking a position of control that might facilitate resolution of our trauma.

What to do?

• What Radical Commitment does is recognize that the pain experienced in resolving our old wounds will feel, at times, worse than death and that without Radical Commitment, we will quit long before we resolve the trauma that is making us miserable. There is no way to muster the courage to move forward thru that pain without Radical Commitment. Nonetheless, Radical Commitment is insufficient. In the conative model of moral maturation (by Sean Hannah), there are four prerequisites to change: 1) awareness, 2) judgment, 3) motivation, and on the other side of courage, 4) action. Radical Commitment speaks only to motivation and and courage. It does nothing to illuminate awareness of our own wound, or our partner’s wound. It does nothing to develop or imagine alternatives to the existing state of the world, and the judgment required to rank-order those imagined states from most to least preferred. And it fails to inform what kinds of actions are required to bring the preferred states into being. That is, Radical Commitment is a necessary, but insufficient, prerequisite to change.
• To practice Radical Commitment, we must be willing to find and open our wounds — both in ourselves and in our partners. We must be willing to seek diagnosis and experiment with remedies, many of which might fail. It isn’t easy to understand what that looks like, although asking, “What problem is my partner trying to solve?” is a good start.
• Recently, I’ve been thinking about this in more detail. I’ve been wondering, “Who hurt my partner? Who neglected her? Who abandoned and abused her in ways that make it almost impossible for her to recover?” and I’ve been thinking about what Radical Commitment might look like to her. Some part of me wants to say, “Let me play that person who hurt you. Let me play that person who abandoned and neglected you. Let me play that person who abused you. Say to me what you wish you could have said to them when they hurt you. Do to me what you wish you could have done to them when they abandoned you. Play out your rage, your anguish, your sadness, with me. You cannot hurt me, because I love you, and my love is invincible.” I think it is maybe a dangerous piece of improvisational theater, to allow your partner to act out their wound with you, from their position of control. But isn’t that what’s happening anyway? What if we made the whole theater of romantic role play explicit, rather than covert? Could we not reach resolution faster?