Personal, Moral, and Structural Commitment to Relationships

Abstract

If I were inclined to frivolity, I might have entitled this chapter “Just Say No to Global Commitment.” The core idea of the commitment framework that I have developed over the last 30 years (Johnson, 1969, 1973, 1978, 1982, 1985, 1991, 1995a) is that there are three distinct experiences of “commitment” (personal, moral, and structural), and that the global concept of commitment therefore misrepresents the nature of commitment phenomena. When I began work on a comparison of the commitments of cohabiting and married couples in 1966, it seemed to me that the concept of commitment was being used by social scientists to refer to at least two distinct phenomena. On the one hand, Howard Becker (1960), for example, was writing about the ways that the social context in which a line of action (say, a relationship) is embedded may produce constraints that virtually force one to continue that line of action whether one wants to or not. On the other hand, when Dean and Spanier (1974) wrote about commitment, they clearly were writing about a personal dedication to the continuation of a relationship even if the social context seemed to be working against it. Dean and Spanier used the term to refer to strong feelings of wanting to continue a relationship; Becker used the term to refer to strong feelings that one had to continue a relationship. And to make matters worse, many authors often drift from one meaning of the term to the other, without seeming to notice this important distinction (e.g., Rosenblatt, 1977).