Are You Afraid to Commit?

Commitment can be scary, right? If you are married, you know that. It is making a choice, saying no to other opportunities and yes to one. When you commit to something, you are promising to make it important in your life. You are making choices about your future that you may not even fully understand. 

Most of my clients are married and so are well aware of the implications involved when you commit to a partner for the rest of your life. It isn’t something we usually take lightly. 

So my question is, how committed are you to creating a strong marriage?

This answer is going to be different for everyone (and at different stages) and I like to help my clients get a clear picture of their level of commitment when we talk. 

But just like you committed to your husband on the day that you got married, you need to commit to your desire to create a strong, powerful and joyful marriage. 

I wish that I could tell you it is super easy. It takes work. It takes being willing to have hard conversations. And sometimes, it can get worse before it gets better. 

I have found in my experience that once you commit, go all in to creating the kind of marriage that you really want, but are maybe even a little afraid to admit that you want, amazing things happen. You feel better and focused and empowered, just by making the commitment. You have a new direction and purpose. And that feels amazing. Amazing enough to carry you through all the hard stuff. 

I have a closet on the first floor of our house. It’s underneath our stairs. We call it our Toy Closet because when my kids were young, that’s where we kept all their toys, but now it mostly just collects stuff. Things tend to pile up in this closet until you can’t see the floor… or the bottom half of the wall. It’s kind of scary to behold. 

So whenever I decide to clean it out, it is a commitment. I have to devote time and energy into making it better. I choose to dive in, not really knowing what I am going to find. My kids might have left an old apple core in there. That is totally possible. And really gross. But I know that it will only fester and get worse if I leave it there. More importantly, I can never use that space for anything productive, unless I commit to wading through the discomfort and working to clean it up. 

As I clean out that closet, I have to commit to taking everything out, throwing away all the garbage, rehoming things that are still usable but that we don’t want anymore, organizing what we do want to keep and putting everything away in a way that we can maintain and use. It is work and it is a process.

When I am done, I am always ecstatic that I made the commitment and did the work. When I see that space being used productively and in a way that I love, I get giddy. In the days after I clean it out, I love just poking my head in there and admiring it. Part of that is feeling proud of the commitment that I made, the work I put into it and that beauty of the end result. 

This is the same process that we go through as we commit to improving our marriages. 

Sometimes I talk to women who are experiencing a lot of pain in their relationship. They feel like they are not connected emotionally to their husband like they used to be. They want for things to be better and they want to feel more love. But they are afraid to commit. 

They don’t want to commit to putting in the time and energy that it will take to actually make the change happen.  

Then I talk to other women who are all in. They are willing to feel that discomfort and commit to spending time working on themselves and having hard conversations with their husbands, because they know that all that is temporary. They know that as soon as they move through that, they will have the kind of marriage that they have always wanted. They will know how to create that marriage, and they are committed to making it happen. They are willing to pay any amount of money to get the tools they need to make it happen. They know that the best things in their lives come with effort and investment.

I believe that there is nothing more powerful than being committed to your marriage. Not just being committed to your husband, although that is massively important too, but being fully committed to your marriage which means that you are going to do anything that you need to do in order to make that marriage amazing. 

I work with my clients every day to do just that. We are pulling out all the junk that has built up in their minds about their relationship. We sift through their thinking and decide what they want to keep and what they can throw away. Then we become really intentional about how they approach their marriage so that it is working for them instead of against them. 

It is a powerful work that changes lives. I’ve seen it in my own marriage and in my clients. 

If you want help creating this result in your marriage, I would love to help. Click the button below to set up a consult call to get started. It isn’t complicated or impossible. It just takes commitment.