Back when I was dating, the dreaded C word was Commitment. As

In the marketplaces of the heart, where vows are weighed like grain and words are traded for futures, a woman speaks with steady fire: “Back when I was dating, the dreaded C word was Commitment. As soon as most men found out I had a child, they ran. If I ever got close enough to say the words, ‘I love you,’ they ran faster.” Hear the thunder under the plain speech. Here is the ledger of a tender commerce in which courage was taxed, and many, when asked for the honest coin of presence, paid instead with disappearance. The sentence is both memory and indictment: that a culture can applaud romance and yet freeze at the first true cost of love.

To name Commitment as “dreaded” is to unmask a common spell. Some pursue delight as if it were harvest without seedtime, wanting the music without the metronome, the feast without the field. But love, rightly told, is a craft: attention shaped into habit, desire yoked to duty, ecstasy anchored to everyday. When the news of a child arrives, the craft is tested. It asks: Will you widen your circle, slow your pace, and bind your strength to theirs? Many will sing; fewer will stay. The speaker’s story counts the fugitives.

Mark the double flight. First, at the mention of the child, the men ran—not from the woman, but from the mirror that responsibility holds up. Second, when she dared to pronounce I love you, they ran again—as if love itself were a summons, not to heightened pleasure, but to honest labor. In the old tongue, such fleeing would be named cowardice; in kinder terms, it is the soul unready for the weight of its own promise. Either way, the result is the same: the one who is ready stands in the doorway with open hands, watching dust settle where a partner might have been.

There is an older story that casts a gentler light. In the scrolls of Israel, Ruth returns from ruin with Naomi, gleaning in foreign fields. Boaz does not run from her losses; he steps toward them, gathering risk into care. He honors law and tenderness together, and from that Commitment—quiet, costly, unglamorous—springs a lineage that will crown kings. The tale does not romanticize the work; it sanctifies it. It teaches that love worth naming often begins where convenience ends, and that loyalty to the vulnerable is a throne sturdier than any charm of youth.

The origin of the quote is not a treatise but a survivor’s logbook—made of small refusals endured and larger truths learned. It tells us that “compatibility” without courage will strand you, that chemistry is a spark but covenant is the hearth. It also names the hidden burden borne by single parents in the court of courtship: the need to audition not only themselves but their household, while would-be partners audition only their appetites. The wisdom distilled is stern and merciful: let the running instruct you. Those who flee at the door would have failed in the storm.

From this, carve a lesson strong enough for sons and daughters. Let Commitment be your measure and your magnet. If someone hesitates at the word child, let their steps teach you the boundary of your peace. If your I love you sends them sprinting, thank the truth for arriving early. A heart with a home inside it is not a bargaining chip; it is sacred ground. Better a smaller circle filled with fidelity than a crowded room of borrowed warmth.

Carry these practices like tools: (1) State your vows-in-embryo early—“I move at the speed of responsibility; if that’s not your pace, bless you on your way.” (2) Treat the child as center, not footnote; invite only those who kneel to that center with reverence. (3) Let affection prove itself in calendars and chores: rides given, meals made, stories read—love that can be scheduled is love that can be trusted. (4) When fear whispers that honesty will cost you company, answer with the psalm of your worth: “I am not hard to love; I am precise about the kind of love that lasts.” In these obediences, the dreaded word becomes a banner, the doorway becomes a threshold, and the path beneath your feet grows bright with companions who do not run, but walk beside you into weather and wonder alike.