The word has accumulated, over time, a quality of burden. Contemporary culture has produced a peculiar ambivalence toward commitment — valuing it in principle while treating it with something close to suspicion in practice. The proliferation of exit options, the language of settling, the cultural celebration of keeping one's options open: these are not simply expressions of freedom. They are, in many cases, expressions of anxiety dressed as freedom.
What commitment actually requires is not the elimination of doubt — no serious commitment is made without doubt — but the willingness to act in spite of it, and to return to the choice repeatedly, in full knowledge that the person you are choosing is not the person you imagined and is also not finished becoming whoever they are going to be.
The paradox of commitment is that certainty is not its precondition. You cannot know, at the beginning, whether the person you are choosing is the right person — because the person you are choosing does not yet fully exist, and neither do you, and the relationship between you will make both of you into people you are not yet. Commitment is not a conclusion. It is a wager.