Do not try to understand yourself with the attitudes of physical seeing. Look within using inner vision.
Do not try to understand yourself with the attitudes of physical seeing. Look within using inner vision.

Commitment 1: I commit myself to full closeness, and to clearing up anything within me that stands in the way.
With this commitment you take a stand for closeness. Both of you agree that this is what your relationship is about. You also commit yourself to working out all the little things and the big things that people put in the way of being close to each other. We desperately want union with other people, but often we are also deathly afraid of it because of the pain it has brought in times past.

When two people agree that they desire closeness, and particularly when they state that they are willing to clear up their barriers to it, the intimacy begins. This conscious commitment is necessary because, until you make it, you are often in the grip of countercommitments that get in the way. For example, many people have an unconscious commitment to ignoring or hiding their barriers to intimacy rather clearing them up. Others have never really considered why they are in relationships at all. They haven't gone public with their intention of being close to others....

Commitment 2: I commit myself to my own complete development as an individual.
In Commitment 1 you take a stand for being close. Here you take a stand for separateness. You cannot have ultimate closeness without being fully able to be separate. In other words, the more fully developed you are as an individual, the more you are able to give and receive love in a relationship. In child development, we first must be able to be close. That is where the nurturance is. Later we must develop the skills of autonomy. Many of us have never had the opportunity to commit ourselves consciously to our own growth. In addition, many of us saw relationships in our past in which people had to compromise their individual development in order to maintain the relationship. They had to get smaller to squeeze themselves into an ill-fitting box. By taking the stand in Commitment 2, you both are going on record as agreeing that individual development and closeness to the other person is important.

In a co-committed relationship, space is as important as closeness. It must be all right for both people to have space and time for themselves. Only through taking space for ourselves can we integrate the learnings in a close relationship. This does not mean you need to go away for a week at a time to rest up (though sometimes that, too, may be a good idea). Taking space may be as simple as a walk or a daily meditation time. In co-dependence, taking space almost always brings up fear. In co-commitment, taking space usually results in a fresh burst of creative ideas. By taking space and time for themselves, partners in a committed relationship renew their individual connections with the universe. Through coming apart and together again, the dance of the relationship is renewed and kept lively.

A commitment to individual development is crucial, because a co-committed relationship emerges only when both people are willing to be 100 percent themselves as individuals. If either person is being less than 100 percent the ground is ripe for power struggles. Each person will be trying to find places to hide from responsibility in the relationship, the places where the other person is at fault. When you are being less than 100 percent, you will tend to want to diminish the other person to match your level. Once you enter the arena of power struggles, there is only one way out: both people must claim 100 percent ownership of the problem....

Commitment 3: I commit to revealing myself fully in the relationship, not to concealing myself.
A major event in our lives occurs when we shift our intentions from concealing to revealing. Most of us learned to hide our true selves in order to survive growing up. It is not surprising that we take this practice into our later relationships. It costs, because a close relationship thrives on transparency. Being fully transparent heals the shadow. If your energy is tied up in concealing who you are and how you are, there is little energy left over to fuel creativity....

Commitment 4: I commit myself to the full empowerment of people around me.
In co-dependence you enable other people to be ineffective. In co-commitment you enable them to be powerful. With this commitment you take a stand to allow others to assume their full power. Imagine how much two people can accomplish when their commitment is to each other's full growth! Contrast this with how little can be accomplished when both people are committed to restraining the other....

Commitment 5: I commit myself to acting from the awareness that I am 100 percent the source of my reality.
Many of the problems in relationships are caused by both partners fighting to claim the victim position. The moment you fail to claim 100 percent creation of your life, you step into a trap. Unconscious loving feeds on victimhood, which can exist only when people are not taking responsibility for what is happening to them. When two people are willing to be the source of their reality, real intimacy becomes possible. There is no energy wasted over whose problem it is, who's right and who's wrong, whose fault it is, or other power struggles....

Commitment 6: I commit myself to having a good time in my close relationships.
In the process of growing up, many of us embrace a view of relationships that causes pain later on: we think that relationships are about suffering. We believe that if the relationship is not a struggle we must not be doing it right. As a child, how many people did you see around you who were in a state of joy in their relationships? What about right now? We feel strongly that a formal commitment to having a good time is necessary to move into a state of co-commitment. We do not know the entire meaning of life, but we are very sure it is not to have a bad time. Why not take a conscious stand for joy in your close relationships? You make the rules for your relationships, so try having them be about joy. If you find that you prefer suffering, you can always go back.

When we observe troubled relationships, we often see that the people are strongly committed but that the commitments are unhealthy. The commitments are to things such as:

Power struggles (who's right, whose problem is it, who's having the worst time)
Taking care of each other
Cleaning up the other's messes
Providing three meals a day
Getting ahead financially.