Is Commitment Punk?

It is if it's authentic!

Commitment, Abbey!

That’s a line from the musical 1776 that my husband and I often quote at each other, usually at totally weird or inappropriate times, but occasionally when we’re reminding each other that we’re fully committed to our marriage.

The older I get, the more I realize how much I value the concept of commitment.

The more time I spend in amatopunk circles, the more I realize that my concept of commitment is a few standard deviations from the traditional amatonormative concept, such as it is.

I know, you’re SHOCKED. Anyway, I’ll explain.

To me, making a commitment to a relationship means establishing and maintaining the intent to be together, to stay together, and to fight for the relationship as long as it feels healthy and right for every participant.

I don’t believe in “unbreakable” commitments. I don’t believe in “committing to someone forever, no matter what happens.” If things in the relationship get toxic, unhealthy, or just plain irreconcilable, then I think it should end. Commitment shouldn’t trap you; instead, it should be an opportunity to consistently choose your partner your relationship despite struggles and changes. If you can’t choose your partner, then the commitment is inauthentic,and you need to end it.

At the same time, I don’t believe in giving up when relationships get hard, or in committing to some parts of a person’s authentic self but not to others. People will change over time, and committing to a person means understanding, accepting, and embracing those changes. Commitment means that you’re not going to be happy and comfortable in your relationship every second of all the time. It means embracing the idea of enduring and embracing discomfort for the sake of moving forward and loving another person in whatever capacity best suits the relationship you’ve built.

Let me say that again; commitment means moving forward and loving another preson in WHATEVER capacity best suits the relationship.

There are SO many different kinds of authentic commitment.

I don’t believe that relationship commitment has to be romantic (another shocker, I’m sure), and that, of course, is where this is all heading. I also don’t believe that there’s one specific, correct form of relationship commitment. In fact, I can think of three or four that I’ve witnessed first hand which are healthy, awesome, and very punk.

Let me show you a few!

I have a friend in the kink community who is polyamorous. She has a nesting partner at home, and she also has a play partner with whom she’s been engaging in a consistent dom/sub dynamic for several years. Let’s call my friend Angie, and her play partner Chris. Those aren’t their names, obviously. She and Chris have clear, consent-based understandings in their relationship. They have boundaries as to what is and isn’t acceptable during play time, and as those boundaries evolve, they discuss them together. They go out of their way to spend a certain amount of dedicated time together, with the understanding that they have other partners and other life commitments. They respect each other’s time, each other’s needs, each other’s goals, and how all those things might be different at different moments.

That’s commitment. It doesn’t look like your traditional, monogamous, cohabitating, till-death-do-us-part romantic commitment, but it’s a very valid relationship commitment,and it’s punk as fuck.

Lots of people in committed relationships will celebrate that with a physical representation. Angie gave Chris a collar that, in their specific kink dynamic, signifies that they’re together. There’s more to it than that, in kink-speak, but there’s commitment at the core, and I think that’s gorgeous.

In some senses, my marriage is a pretty traditional commitment. We got legally married. We exchanged engagement rings and wedding rings, both of which I proudly wear on a chain. We never did get around to changing our names (and now we can’t; thanks, America) but we had both planned to hyphenate so that we each shared in the other’s original surname. We wanted to do that not to signify any kind of ownership of each other (neither of us is into that possessive shit) but instead to proudly display our commitment.

NB: I think it’s important that, regardless of how you choose to express it, you be proud of any commitments you take on. Even if it’s a subtle pride that you keep just for you and your partner, that pride is important. If you’re not proud of your commitment, you might want to consider what you do feel, and that means in terms of authentic consent.

But of course, as you all know, my husband and my strong and consistent commitment to each other still allows for us to have other committed relationships. At this particular moment in time, he and I are not seeking romantic relationships outside of our marriage, and for me, that will probably be a forever thing. If our needs change in regards to romantic outreach, we’ll discuss it, move forward, and work to discover a system that meets both our needs in the relationship. This will probably be HARD, and it will not necessarily be FUN, and that’s okay. We are committed to doing what we need to do to maintain a marriage that is one of the most important elements in both our lives.

I’ll tell you a secret, now, about me. I wasn’t always this commitment-prone. In fact, for most of my life, I was a pretty big commitment-phobe, and I shied away from the concept that anything could be long-term, let alone forever. I did this because I was scared, sure. I did this because I doubted my own ability to stay interested in or focused on someone for a long period of time, and I also did this because I was absolutely positive that as an aspec woman, I’d never be able to capture and hold someone’s interest long term, and that I’d get hurt in the process of trying.

And, I mean, that was true. I did get hurt a lot, even without necessarily seeking long-term commitment. Not everybody understands acespec people seeking relationships. It was a little ugly out there. You get it.

I didn’t agree to marry David until ten years into our relationship. At that point, the idea of living without him was too horrific for me to move in any other direction. I was locked in, whether I wanted to admit it or not. I was proud of the relationship, dedicated to the relationship, and the only thing holding me back was the fear. I dove in, and in this case, I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

That won’t be the case with every commitment in our lives, of course. We’ll regret lots of them. Mistakes happen.

Commitments in non-monogamy, of course, can be even harder. When you and your partner are also committed to other partners, it can be very easy to discover that there’s an imbalance of energy or attention, and that you aren’t meeting your partner’s needs despite your best efforts. That actually wasn’t the problem with any of the queerplatonic relationships I had up until this point; they all ended for other, much more dramatic reasons that I needn’t go into here, but my point is that I was pretty convinced I wasn’t going to find a queerplatonic commitment, and that maybe I shouldn’t even want one. Maybe, I thought, non-monogamy was meant to create transient connections. Maybe I was going to need to settle for brief periods of intense emotional attachment followed by a parting of ways.

As you saw in some of my posts last year, that wasn’t working so well for me. That’s not who I’m turning out to be. I want to build with people, and I think that I can.

Recently, my QPP and I made our own little commitment gesture; we got matching pokemon tattoos. They are super cute and I’m obsessed with them, but this was also a huge step for me, and I’m not feeling anxious or spirally about it. This commitment feels right, because he and I have both come to understand each other’s needs over the past two and a half years, and I really do feel fully confident that we can move forward in a way that will continue to work for both of us, even if that means making changes, having tough conversations, and being vulnerable with each other at awkward times.

It feels pretty fantastic to know that such a thing is possible, and that, through both David and my QPP, I’m not alone in wanting powerful, committed connections outside of the amatonorms.

What commitments have you made in your life that look a little different from the traditional, romantic ones that we’re told to prioritize?