Can you commit? (essay)

On Sunday I spoke to a friend I haven’t been in touch with for at least a decade. It was awesome. She lives near Boston, in one of those beautiful suburbs outside the city, and for the first time since 2005, when I had my heart broken by the person who I moved to Boston with because I thought we were going to get married, but was clearly not meant to marry, I thought, hmm, maybe I should move to Boston.

Not for the leaves. Although they would be a plus.

But Boston has lots of universities, and as someone looking for a university teaching job, more options means more chances. At least you’d think, but of course, my area of expertise is writing, not statistics.

This is what I do: I think about places I could live, and I imagine how wonderful life would be there. The same is true for people I date, when I am dating. And that is why, I think, I somehow find a way to only date men who are essentially unavailable. If you don’t ever have real intimacy with someone, you can continue to project all your hopes and dreams onto them until the moment you realize the situationship you’re in is taking more out of you than it’s putting in.

Not being able to commit is about not trying and instead dwelling in fantasy about what could be, rather than staying in the reality of what is. If you don’t ever really make the effort, then you don’t fail, right?

Wrong.

Every choice I—and this is me personally now, I’m not commenting on the world as a whole, because I am well aware of the personal privilege that allows me to have choices in the first place—don’t make is, in fact, a choice.