100. Commitment Is a Choice, Love Is Not

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Commitment Is a Choice, Love Is Not.”

I wonder sometimes if we're deluding ourselves by thinking that to love another person is something that we actually choose to do. Is love really something we can decide to just have? All of a sudden, I'm not even sure two people are even talking about the same thing when they talk about love. In the English language, the word love is so broad.

It could probably be applied to describe at least 50 different emotions. The love you have for your children isn't the same as the love you have for your spouse. The love you have for mankind is not the same as the love you have for your favorite kind of food. One of the only things that seems to be common across all definitions of love though, is that it's a positive emotion.

But being in emotion, I think it's also fair to say that it's not a thing people decide to do. That's the thing about emotions is we don't get to choose. When we feel them, they come and go on their own time. The reason I think it matters to recognize that is because a lot of us sometimes feel guilty when we don't feel love for a person that we're supposed to love.

We're told we need to love our children. We're told we need to love our spouse, and we're told we need to love our parents. There are a lot of people we are expected to love. If you're religious, you're most likely told that you need to love all of mankind. Even that's a tall order. People are not always very pleasant, and I'd say that most of the time I personally don't quote love people, but some of the time, I really do.

If you happen to have a spouse, for example, that's yelling at you and telling you how terrible you are. I don't know if it's fair to say that you're still going to be feeling love in that moment. Maybe to some extent we will always love a person, like a child, for example. They may be little terrors, but most parents are always going to want the best for them, even if they grow up to be terrible people.

Then again, I'm not sure it's even fair to call that love. Maybe more accurately, it's a persistent hope and commitment to their wellbeing. All the better though. If you can continue to feel love for people that treat you poorly, but that just isn't always the case for everyone. Unlike love though, commitment is something we get to choose.

We also get to choose what we are going to do to allow love to happen in the first place. Not only that, but we can choose to change our perspective on how we see another person. Chasing the emotion of love without a willingness to commit to actions that allow it to exist will just keep you trapped in a hamster wheel.

You'll go from relationship to relationship trying to find that special person, but you'll never find them. When some people commit to love, it seems like what they are trying to say is that they will never get angry and never disappoint. But that isn't really fair to anyone. I wonder if instead of love, what we actually should be offering to those closest to us is a commitment to not walk away at the first signs of trouble and to always try to do things that give loving feelings, a chance to happen when someone does quote, choose to love someone else.

Their mind might interpret that command in a lot of ways. As far as actions taken when we quote, choose to love. They're fairly ambiguous. Maybe to some people. Choosing to love means that they're choosing to avoid negative thoughts about someone. For another person, it may mean that they're going to try to behave in ways that they see other loving people do, regardless of the feelings behind it.

And maybe for someone else, it means to try to adopt a perspective that makes it easier for them not to dislike the person they're supposed to love. I just wonder sometimes if the ambiguous nature of the word love does more harm than good. Having a clear definition of what loving is going to look like would certainly help a lot of people in a romantic relationship.

It would be so nice to know what another person is committing to when they say that they're going to love you forever. If loving  them means that they're going to allow you to live with them, versus they're going to make an effort each day to do the things that they know will make you feel loved. It might help you decide if there's someone you actually wanna be with.

Of course, in any kind of committed relationship, you're bound to have days that are better or worse than others. It's the commitment that keeps you together, though. You can have a whirlwind romance with lots of feelings attached to it, but it will never have a chance to endure very long without commitment to each other, and life just isn't as meaningful without someone else to live it for.

Commitment has never guaranteed everlasting love for people, but it is a completely necessary prerequisite to developing and experiencing a kind of love that goes] deep. Knowing that commitment of some kind is the bedrock of any kind of enduring love means we need to decide what we're going to commit to when we commit to someone, whether it's a child or a spouse, more often than not, I think we're committing to watch out for them and to look out for their wellbeing.

You're committing to see them in their entirety and not allowing their flaws to define them. In the case of a romantic relationship, you're committing to double down on the things that make each other feel loved. I think sometimes when people don't feel love anymore, they think, oh no, this isn't right.

Maybe it isn't meant to be, by all means. Maybe it isn't right to stay with a person, but whether or not you feel love probably is the wrong metric to base that decision on because love comes and goes on its own time. The better question is probably, are we keeping our commitments to each other? Part of the problem with that though is that almost nobody really thinks out what they're committing to.

They just know they love each other at that moment, but not necessarily how they plan to keep that love burning moving forward. Generally speaking, the only commitment that seems to be universal in a romantic relationship is to not cheat on each other, but that's just the bare minimum love is made of the things we do to allow it to come to us.

I am not married anymore, but if I do marry again someday, I want it to  be something amazing. So instead of promising to love her, I wanna promise to always come back after a fight. I want to promise to do things that are going to make her feel loved. I want to promise her that I will come to her before anyone else.

And I wanna promise to protect her and to care for her. And I wanna promise to never stop. Seeking out ways for us to draw closer love in all of its varieties is a powerful emotion that I hope to experience as much as possible. So I'm going to choose to commit myself to the things that will make it flourish.

And I hope you can too. This is Skipping Stones. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com, new episodes will be released weekly every Monday.