Commitment, rather than Compatibility

In 2008, our middle-school-aged daughter was over the moon with excitement when my wife, Jo, agreed to take her and her friends to a concert featuring one of the hottest boy bands of the era. It was not Jo’s kind of music, but she was thrilled to share the experience with my daughter and her friends. Then Jo received a cancer diagnosis; and for the next two years, concerts, sleepovers, ballgames, wrestling matches, dances, and family events were replaced by weekly chemotherapy treatments and nine surgeries. My daughter’s eager anticipation of the concert was pushed aside by desperate pleas for her mother’s life. While their circumstances and events changed overnight, their commitment to one another grew stronger.

Today, as I write, the two of them are planning a trip. The same boy band, or least one of the members, is having a concert just a few hours away. He’s neither of their favorites now. But this concert, this trip, is about so much more than music. It’s a victory lap of sorts. It’s a celebration of love and commitment.

When it comes to relationships, we’ve become a culture obsessed with compatibility and unfamiliar with commitment. We invest our energy and efforts into identifying and comparing likenesses and differences in superficial and ever-changing preferences, opinions, habits, hobbies, music, dreams, goals… without any real thought concerning what it means to be committed to one another.

The Bible says that we are each made unique and wonderfully complex (Psalm 139:14). We also know that as we age, our personal preferences, outlooks, abilities, desires, goals… change. That means that you are not 100% compatible with any other human. We each start as a unique and wonderfully complex person. Then, even if we find someone who seems to fit just right, we’re each changing in just as unique and wonderfully complex ways as we age. What does this mean? It means that compatibility alone will not sustain any relationship. The very preferences and activities that we once shared and admired in one another become sources of conflict as we grow in different ways and at different rates. The wife who used to enjoy hunting with her husband now despises the frequencies of his hunts. The husband who loved his wife’s organizational skills now sees her as controlling.

This is why a couple who dates for at least two years before marrying is statistically far less likely to divorce than a couple who marries after dating less than two years. It seems that two years allows enough time to expose the incompatibilities, inevitable in any relationship, forcing the couple to decide if they are committed beyond whatever short-lived compatibilities attracted them to one another.

When couples find themselves so excited by broad ranges of compatibility that they rush to marry their perceived soulmate, they often find a lack of actual commitment when the inevitable incompatibilities arise. Perhaps this means that the only truly sustainable compatibility is mutual commitment to one another.

Without commitment, incompatibilities can become insurmountable, turning us into competitors in a zero-sum game in which everyone loses. Without commitment, our differences become the bricks we use to build walls between us. Yet with commitment, those same differences in perspectives, opinions, or preferences are the very complimentary traits that make our relationships stronger. They become the bricks we use to fortify our relationships.

Commitment is built upon trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is built through the consistent alignment of expectations and actions. That consistency requires repetition. Repetition requires time.

Slow down. Build the commitment as one of your compatibilities or try to rebuild it after the inevitable incompatibilities start surfacing. As you might guess, it takes a lot less time and a lot less conflict to build commitment early than it does to rebuild trust later.