Can one love without commitment? Great question! I’m glad you asked. I’m having difficulty with this one because I do believe you can love someone without being married.

Love and commitment are not mutually exclusive nor are they requisites. So what is love all about?

It is most certain that you can love without commitment. After all, you can’t make a commitment until you first love. At that time you can take it to the “next level.” The next level can be a fell-swoop that is called marriage, or it can go in baby-steps, like exclusive dating, seeing each other more often, seeing each other a whole lot, moving in, engagement and ultimately marriage.

So, I think we can all agree that you can be in love while not yet in a committed, committed (sic) relationship.

It then becomes a question of how long can you go without commitment? That depends a lot on the psyche of each person, the age, stage of life, persona goals, health, financial concerns, education, needs wants and desires to mention but a few.

Years ago, people actually could date more than one person. Life was simpler then. First of all, many people dated and actually didn’t have sex, so the fear of STDs was diminished. Today, sex is much more part of dating. It's pretty much expected,especially for the older set that has been married and already had sex. You see, married people usually have had some sex, albeit maybe not as the marriage moved toward the sexless-stage that often precedes divorce or just living a life of frustration and boredom.

In today's world you have to figure you are going to have sex and you should want some level of commitment to keep your risk of STDs to a minimum as well as for the emotional health associated with the people involved in good relationships.

Unless one is rather immature at this age and looking to have sex with many partners for the excitement, having a bond with another person who you can count on is very comforting.

While many people at this age are looking to find a soul mate to escort them through thick and thin, and ultimately to the grave so they won’t be alone, they seem to feel that can only be accomplished with the legal bond of marriage. Ask a few thousand divorcees how that paln worked out, and you will find that marriage is not the guarantee they expected. Marriage does make it harder to walk away, and I am sure many people remain together to this day because they can’t afford to leave, but is that really sensible?

How about staying together because you really can’t live without each other? How about mutual respect, comfort and increasing the quality of each others lives so they would never ever want to leave. Great marriages figured that out. It should also be able to work for great relationships, but it really does seem that many people don’t feel connected or whole without the marriage to confirm to the world that they are connected in more than a casual manner.

How do Curt Russell and Goldie Hawn do it? They’ve been together for many years as a couple without ever getting married. I suspect that they have very strong egos and know they would be fine if the other ever left, and I suspect that they know the secret of making each other feel so good that they would never want to leave.

This is all very confusing!