I am not conceited, but I have to include this point so as to "check" everything--I am selective. Since I am well educated and intelligent, I like to date men who are compatible on these terms while I am also able to find them attractive (to me), ethical, fun, and socially skilled. This is an very difficult combination to find. I just want to be in a happy, committed relationship. I want to love and be loved. I have friends and family but feel very lonely for something deeper.
A committed relationship is a marriage--perhaps not always a legal one, but certainly an emotional and spiritual one. If you avoid marriage because you fear that you may feel differently in 10 or 20 years, then what is "committed" about the relationship? If what you mean by "commitment" is commitment to serial monogamy for as long as it feels good, OK, but in my view that is just a kind of playing at commitment which would be more accurately called "I'll stay with you until something better comes along, or until you lose whatever it is that now attracts me to you."
If that is the sort of intimate life you desire, so be it, but at least understand that there is absolutely nothing "committed" about such a procedure. Commitment, as I understand it, accepts (of course) that everything changes over time, but the couple is committed to going through all those changes--mental, emotional, physical, spiritual--together. I call this "drink the cup--right to the dregs." If that kind of commitment is not present, all that really exists is a kind of business deal: you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Personally speaking, I think that being alone and solitary in life is far less lonely than that kind of conditional so-called "commitment" in which ones lover might walk out as soon as one fell upon hard times, or became somehow disfigured, or ill, or unpopular, or poor. How can that kind of "take care of number one" approach ever really be called "commitment?"
Most bright, educated people who imagines that being able to think and to understand others' ideas means somehow that one is in control of thoughts and behavior (metacognition). I disagree totally with that view. I do not believe that we choose our thoughts; in my experience thoughts simply arise spontaneously from some unknown source, and afterwards we say "I think such and such. But how am "I" different from my thoughts? "I" am my thoughts; there is no thinker separate from them. Once this is seen, one begins to understand that there is nobody in control of anything: all of this "life" is simply unfolding as it does, and "myself" is the witness of it--he or she who is aware of this constant arising--not the doer of any of it. Does anyone really choose anything, or do we instead do what we must--the only thing we could have done--after perhaps agonizing over the idea of having to choose? In other words, perhaps ones "choices" really are much more an expression of ones character--ones destiny if you like that word better than character--and not really subject to conscious manipulation.
All of us humans are limited and wounded by our experiences with parents and other early caregivers, as well as by all our other experiences, and even by genetics. That is the basis for loving another person--one stops trying to make the best possible deal, and instead understands that the shortcomings of one's particular partner are the shortcomings of all of us. We all are deeply injured, and profoundly limited. The child, born in innocence, is not properly received, and the adult pays the price. We all need love, both to give and receive it. This is a human need--not a personal one of yours.
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