How to Avoid Commitment... from a Married Guy!

The title of this particular blog alone could cause a nationwide harrumph and quick click to the next. Avoid commitment...and he’s married? It’s like a priest teaching you how to box!

But, rent any old Cagney or Bogart flick and chances are good there’s a priest shooting hoops and showing the kids how to put up their dukes. So, there ya go.

Besides, I dodged the bullet with my now-wife for well over 10 years, having a dating period that leaned on 15 years and an engagement that dragged on for close to 7. Surely I get points for that, no?

Many women believe that assurances are all a guy needs to commit. Promise him he’ll still have his Saturday mornings on the golf course, that you won’t get on him about his dirty socks finding their way—miraculously—into the microwave, that everything will stay exactly the same. The female version of “no new taxes”. Interestingly, while most women would be surprised at how to get a commitment from a man, you boys will be surprised at how easy it is to avoid it...plus keep her as your girlfriend.

1)     Be career-oriented. It’s irresistible, a respectable reason for not marrying right away, and can buy boatloads of time. Be smart about using this, though; if she knows for a fact you’re giving 20 hours of every given day to “World of Warcraft” you’re just asking for trouble. If you’re a telemarketer in a bowling league and with a weekly poker night, then “ambitious” is not an adjective that is going to ring true.

2)     Have prior commitments, particularly those that involve either your family or a business partner—it shows you’re not afraid of commitment but, rather, already mid-one. This only gets you so much time before she questions her priority status, however.

3)     There is also debt, arrest warrants, and drug habits as a viable means to putting off ring shopping, albeit unhealthy and self-destructive. Then again, think about all the women who are into conjugal visits and death row widows.

4)     Perhaps introspection is the best way to go. Ask yourself why you want to hold off on committing. You just may have a good reason of your own. Your first thought may be that you don’t really have faith in the institution, which could stem from a bad break-up or your parents’ divorce, thereby giving you something substantial and real to address. Maybe that first thought will be that she’s not the one or you’re still hung up on someone else or even that you don’t ever want to get married and you’re just now realizing it.

I caution you, though: I went through that. I was convinced for quite some time that marriage wasn’t for me yet stayed in the relationship anyway, lying to her and to myself. Meantime, friends were married, divorced, and married again all throughout. They, too, wondered if marriage truly was for them, and some of them still do.

As for if I still wonder, my 5-year-old daughter asked me the other day if I would marry her mother again.

“Let’s see,” I replied. “Would I get you again?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then yes I would,” I told her. “Absolutely.”