Why So Many People Fail At Being Committed To Just One Person

The other day I was listening to an Ed Sheeran song on YouTube and it really got me thinking about the whole concept of commitment and why so many people fail at it. There’s a part in the video, where they are speaking, that’s just amazingly true:

Her: “It’s possible isn’t it? It’s possible that you can meet someone who is perfect for you even though you’re committed to somebody else.”
Him: “No. The thing is, if you’re committed to somebody, you don’t allow yourself to find perfection in someone else.”
Her: “You’re just telling me what I wanna hear.”

I think his answer is everything. It sums up everything about commitment perfectly. It’s the ultimate answer to why people fail at being committed. They allow other people to enter their lives and become more important than the person they are with.

When you are truly committed, you don’t put yourself in situations where you look at other people around you like potentially new partners. Some stranger shouldn’t suddenly become more important than the person who you shared your life with.

At one point they are there, they are in a relationship and they swear they are fully committed and in the next, you see them taking off with some other person. Lack of commitment ends relationships and marriages more and more every day. And it’s really difficult to understand and to process that somebody could shift their love and commitment so easily.

People try to justify the lack of commitment by explaining how their relationship was going through a rough patch, how life got too busy and they didn’t have enough time for each other, how their partner didn’t understand their needs, how falling for somebody else is something that just happened and so on. They are all lame excuses. They didn’t take their commitment seriously. They made promises they couldn’t keep. It happened because you allowed it to happen. Period.

It was easier to move on with somebody new than to work on improving your relationship. They just lacked the effort to invest in a relationship and fix what might be in the process of breaking it. At some point, another their new relationship will hit a rough patch too, and what are they going to do then, try to find what they are missing in somebody else?

The thing is, there is probably something missing from them. They lack the idea of what relationships are essentially about. They forget their promises of love, devotion, honesty and respect and they think only about themselves and their convenience. That’s not love and devotion, it’s plain selfishness.

Going from one person to another seeking perfection won’t solve anything. That’s destructive for all the people involved. You can’t build your happiness at the expense of somebody else’s pain. You can’t disregard all that you had with that person and toss it away like it never existed. If you can, you were never truly committed.

When you are truly committed, you are loyal to just one person. You never think about disrespecting them, betraying their trust or turning your back on the love they are giving you. You don’t allow yourself to do so. You remain loyal.