You want commitment? Put on your best suit....get your arms around me, now we're goin' down, down, down....

I’ve just wrapped up a 40-minute conversation (monologue – I was allowed to contribute precious little) with a friend who’s going through commitment woes. In his case, of course, his lady friend is refusing to ‘commit’ (I’ve noticed that it’s invariably the lads who get tagged as being ‘commitment phobic’, which, I suppose, is true to a point, but not a generality. It’s not that we’re all wham-bam-thank you ma’am…there are some snap decisions which our brains take a while to fathom, so, solpa adjust madi, as Bubbles would say).

I don’t know what the lad was complaining about, though. When you’re 6 months short of 21, you’re pushing your luck a wee bit (and I speak from painful experience) if you’re thinking about ‘commitment’ in terms of marriage, kids, mortgages, tea-in-bed, buttered scones and pancakes on Sunday, and the rest of the whole 9 yards. If, at 21, you’re getting laid regularly (with the same person, I may hasten to add) and have a steady date for weekend movies or pub crawls or gigs, who’s seeing you and only you, then you ought to be breaking out extra grog rations. You can’t possibly ask for more.

You think of that sort of stuff when you’re closing in on 30, with (at least) 3-4 years of 20-hour work days and 20-hour drunken weekends under your belt; when you badly feel the need to find someone equally screwed up as you to wake up next to every morning (well, most mornings). I say ‘equally screwed up’ for good reason here, damen und herren. Any more screwed up, and you become Daddy Day-Care for a manically depressed, whiny, and incontinent partner. Any less screwed up, and you end up with Granny Weatherwax (or the male equivalent thereof).

And you really ought to know better than to look to me for advice / as a role model. I’ve spent the last eight years looking out for someone who’d be more than just a weekend date or an ONS. The fact that I’ve been single for 1643 days (as of today) should indicate that either my approach is flawed, or I am. But then, I’ve been generally satisfied with my approach (or lack thereof, actually) to these things. Just don’t follow my lead, eh?