A Sense of Duty in Dating

In so many areas of life, we know and respect duty: the duty to get up every morning to go to work, to finish our vegetables, to call our parents, to do our stomach-strengthening exercises, to file our taxes. Adulthood would not be possible without a high adaption to a range of hugely unpleasant tasks.

The danger is when we import into areas where it doesn’t belong an attitude of enforced stoic resignation to apparent necessity. A trait that can save us in one sphere may doom us in another. This respect for obligation can easily spill over into our expectations of love, shaping a sense of duty in relationships that feels hard to question.

When Dating Starts to Feel Like an Obligation

We may have been at the dating game for a while now. We would – ideally – have expected to have found a solution by now, but we are still here, organising meals, coffee dates and walks in the park. Our friends and families are getting fed up. There have been suggestions – lightly delivered but galling still – that we may be being a bit too difficult. We shouldn’t expect paradise. We need to give people a chance. We mustn’t turn our backs on decent opportunities.

It’s precisely because we are so on the side of duty that the charges stick – and may explain why we have, after all, come out tonight, despite the weather, on a dinner date with a person who fits our requirements perfectly – on paper. They are the correct age, they look pleasant, they have a nice job, their manner is considered and sunny. This is the opportunity we have been waiting for.

We ask a lot of questions. We smile back. We ask them about their sister and their job in timber. But nothing can quite subtract from an underlying issue: we don’t want to be here. Not in our gut. We really don’t like the situation. Something is telling us that this isn’t right and yet, because the verdict doesn’t square with society’s calculus of value, we’re frozen and ashamed. We forge on. How can we be so difficult? Who are we to turn anyone down? What is this choosiness, at our age, with our track record?

The Cost of Not Being on Our Own Side

We may have had childhoods in which what we happened to think or want was of little interest to anyone else – and are likely to have developed into people who are by inclination happy to extend this attitude to ourselves.

The fault must, we suppose, lie squarely with us. Something to do with our wilfulness, our attachment style, or our traumas, which means we cannot feel as we should around this undeniably nice person who recently went hiking in Patagonia and has an MBA.

We might – on account of all this – suggest another meeting, we might say we’ve had a wonderful time, we might go home with them, start a relationship with them, even get married to them. Not being on our own side can grow into a very consequential habit.

sense of duty in relationshipsRethinking a Sense of Duty in Relationships

We are missing another voice. One that tells us that, contrary to our fears, it might be entirely credible to listen to our instincts, even if we can’t properly account for them. We might be allowed to have a hunch and not go into details. It might be acceptable not to smile if we don’t want to, not to say yes when we’re feeling worried and not to think it’s our fault for being unable to desire.

Perhaps there doesn’t need to be pathology. We may not be able to say quite why, and that’s just because – in many fields – we can’t legitimately account for the origins of our responses. Most of us is sunk in darkness. We can no more explain this than an aversion to olives or ice skating. There is never an on-paper ideal.

To pick someone from a sense of duty is, in any case, the very worst fate we could accord another human. No parent would have wanted this for their infant at the start.

We need to be extremely dutiful to get through life. But if we’re to make any success of love, we have to learn also the art of being stubbornly loyal to our most authentic feelings, and to resist allowing a misplaced sense of duty in relationships to override them, even if, and especially when, these happen to be silently and very inconveniently screaming ‘no’ over a slice of almond cake with a perfect 10.