Fear of Commitment

I have lost another personal trainer.

That's four, since April, three at this new gym alone. The first one explained why she was leaving, provided her contact details and has kept in touch, but the other three just vanished. You see them on a Wednesday morning, they say, "Now, do we need to schedule appointments for the next few weeks?", they send you off with homework for the weekend, and then Friday afternoon the call comes, "Hi, this is Sarah from X's Gym, Ryan has gone on to other adventures, so I'll be your new trainer. Looks like you've got an appointment scheduled on...Monday. I will meet you then, and am really looking forward to training with you!"

They must either get fired abruptly or quit in a huff. I'm thinking it's the latter. It can't be good business practice to go through them so rapidly - why does X's Gym not fire the manager who's pissing them off instead, and actually keep its investment in training so many new staff? And they don't seem to realize that training is a very personal experience - because the trainer pushes you to limits of pain and endurance and fear, and they're the ones there to reassure you and catch you if you fall, you end up quite bonded with these people, so for them just to vanish like that is actually quite upsetting.

And the same thing is happening at work. We're being restructured, and they have promised us that it's not about a reduction of headcount, but in the past few weeks three different colleagues have just disappeared. Two were asked to go; one resigned, after only being with us a very short time, for an opportunity he couldn't refuse. One of the ones asked to go had a office around the corner from mine. His name is still on the door, and it's a bit creepy when you walk past. Nobody else liked him much, he had the personality of a Mr. Rogers, and he talked seriously non-stop once he got your ear, but he had lived in Japan and Singapore for a long time and did some really interesting work at ad agencies there, and so if you asked him the right questions the long rambling stories would be really interesting. We'd been to lunch a few times and I was just about to start feeding him some strategic advice on how to improve his standing with his colleagues, and he vanished. I was away for two days and when I came back he was gone. And he hasn't got back in touch at all, even though he would perfectly well know my work email address. Probably humiliated. Or in financial and family panic.

Why does Corporate America treat human beings as disposable? Why doesn't it understand that you actually form relationships with people, and when they are severed like this, with no warning and no chance to say goodbye, it's actually quite damaging to the people who remain.

So, tomorrow I'm going to march up to the manager of all the trainers at X's Gym and demand from them a long-term commitment. I'm going to ask for a senior trainer, maybe him, who's not going to leave, because, I'm going to tell him, I'm not just some housewife coming in because she's bored, I really want to do this seriously and I need someone who can commit to do it with me and support me.

But that raises a question in itself. Am I ready to make a long-term commitment? There's still the restructure on. There's still an outside chance of a job offer in Milwaukee, and the reasonable girl in me knows that I would fit much better in a town of 1.5 million people. That is an hour and a half from Chicago, with 9.5 million people. But it's risky. My senior managers are encouraging me to stay, and see what happens. And hopefully I've impressed them all enough that they'll give me some seniorish job to do while I'm waiting, some way to have impact on how the whole thing turns out.

I am definitely holding back from bonding with this town. I haven't unpacked the boxes, yes, famously, but also I haven't started any clubs or joined any, I'm not making any sort of effort to extend social invitations to a wider circle at work. I haven't put the word out that I'm looking for a new boyfriend. I don't even venture too far from my usual paths to work, home, and grocery, to explore and get to know more of my town. I am waiting. I am holding back. Maybe I'm afraid of being abandoned again.

A new boyfriend would be nice - in fact, what I really want is to be married. To have someone who has stood up and said, in front of God and our relatives, that no matter what, even if all the people around you get summarily dismissed and walked to the door with their belongings and never write and never call, you will still have me around, we will go through it all together.

What will it take to get me to throw myself into living here, fully? The example of several dear friends, whose policy is "You shouldn't stop living in a place, just because it's possible you might leave it."? Or something as arbitrary and extra-curricular as demanding a better trainer relationship at the gym? If in order to get a long-term commitment from a serious trainer, I have to make one myself, could I do it, and could that be the thing that makes all the other commitments fall into place? It's a bit off to the side and out of left field. But, you know, these things always are.