Why Are So Many People Afraid of Commitment?

One morning I went out to our swimming pool to practice casting — I do that regularly, it’s my thing. We’ve got several dogs. The maltipoo, the golden doodle, the big Doberman. They all stayed at the edge and barked. Circled. Made noise. Did nothing.

Then there’s Level.

Level is a rescue. He was found on the streets, attacked by a coyote — lost half an ear — bitten by a copperhead and survived it. The dog is tough and tenacious. And when he saw that water? He didn’t bark. He didn’t circle the edge. He didn’t keep his options open.

He jumped straight in. All in.

That image is what I want to talk about — because what keeps most of us barking around the edge of life, relationships, faith, and marriage is one of the most misunderstood fears anyone carries. It’s not the fear of failure, or rejection, or the unknown. It’s the fear of commitment.

We think avoiding commitment gives us freedom

Our culture has made non-commitment look cool. Month-to-month leases. Free agency. Escape clauses. Prenuptial agreements. I walked past a Gold’s Gym sign recently that read: “Best offer of the year — zero enrollment and no contract.” And I thought: that is our culture in a nutshell. We want the body without the commitment. We want the result without the pledge.

Here’s my definition of fear: a frantic effort to avoid reality. And the fear of commitment is exactly that. We think if we don’t commit — if we keep our options open — we’ll eventually find what we’re looking for. Trust. Intimacy. Happiness. Joy.

But here’s what I’ve learned: those things don’t exist outside of commitment. They are the result of commitment. You don’t find intimacy and then commit. You commit and then discover intimacy. You don’t find trust and then give yourself. You give yourself and then build trust.

Commitment means to pledge yourself to a stance no matter what the circumstance. That’s it. And it starts with God.

God modeled total commitment first

Before we talk about your commitment, think about his. God has been fully committed to you before you ever thought about him. All the way back to the Garden, when Adam and Eve broke the first commitment, God didn’t walk away. He set in motion the most costly plan in history — arranging for the sins of the world to fall on his only Son.

And think about what Jesus faced on the cross. Twenty-four hours earlier, in Gethsemane, he was asking if there was another way. God said go. And Jesus went.

As he hung there, don’t you think the enemy was working on his commitment quotient? “You’re God — jump down. Bail out. Don’t stay in the game.” But Jesus stayed. Fully committed. With your life and mine on his mind.

That is the God we serve. And Psalm 37:5 says: “Commit your way to the Lord. Trust also in him and he will do it.” God’s commitment to you is unconditional and constant. The question is whether you’ve committed to him.

The four areas where commitment changes everything

Once you’ve settled that, here’s where it flows into your actual life:

God. Have you actually committed your life to him — not just intellectually agreed, not just attended, but pledged yourself to following him no matter the circumstance? That’s the starting line.

The church. When Paul was on the Damascus road and Jesus appeared to him, he said: “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Paul wasn’t attacking Jesus directly — he was attacking the church. Jesus and the church are synonymous in his mind. To commit to Christ is to commit to his body. I did some research and discovered that 30% of our most faithful people show up to church once every three weeks. We want trust and community and belonging — and then we treat the one institution Jesus ever built like an optional subscription. Those don’t add up.

Your spouse. Here’s what people tell me when they’re afraid of marriage: “What if someone better comes along?” I’ll tell you what I’ve told a lot of people — there will always be someone better looking, richer, cooler than your spouse. Always. That’s just math. If you’re waiting until there’s absolutely no one else you might ever be attracted to, you will never commit. And if you’ve been hurt before and built walls to protect yourself — I understand. But those walls don’t protect you. They just keep you alone.

The deepest parts of marriage — the things the romantic comedies promise but never deliver — only happen in the soil of commitment. Most of marriage isn’t fireworks and butterflies. Most of marriage is lukewarm. That’s not failure. That’s where the real work happens, and where real intimacy is built. When things get hard, that’s when you put it in four-wheel drive. You don’t bail out right before the breakthrough.

Your people. One time I was in some swampy water with a Marine friend who’d served in Vietnam. When I came out of the water I had a big black leech on my leg. He burned it off. That visual stuck with me.

Do you have any re-leech-ionships? People who are just draining the emotional and relational energy out of your life? The enemy specializes in placing two or three of those people in every person’s circle. Burn them off. And then replace them with people who are committed — people who are doing the work, who are all in. You find those people when you’re both serving somewhere. You find them at church, not at the edge of the pool.

Feelings are not the starting line

One of the great lies about commitment is that you need to feel it first. I’ll be honest: sometimes when I get up to speak I’d rather be at home by my pool, drinking coffee, making poached eggs, casting in the water. I don’t always feel like doing the thing I’m called to do. Feelings lie. They fluctuate. They’re influenced by sleep, hunger, stress, and a dozen other things that have nothing to do with the reality of what you’ve committed to.

Commitment is a decision you make that feelings eventually follow. Not the other way around.

Level didn’t test the water first. He didn’t think about whether the temperature felt right. He didn’t bark around the edge until conditions were perfect. He saw the pool and he jumped.

That’s what it looks like. It’s going to be cold sometimes. You’re going to get wet. But that’s the only way you get in.