Understanding the Commitment Journey

Why we invest in people, products, and causes

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on what drives us to commit—sometimes repeatedly—to people and products. I’m exploring this as a way to better understand how humans build trust, develop affinity, and cultivate loyalty. I’m using this framework in both my personal relationships and the things I’m building. While many models already exist to explain these dynamics, most reduce the process into funnels, ladders, or pyramids, attempting to simplify what is inherently complex.

*For the purpose of this essay, ‘product’ includes projects, causes, and services.

While user journeys and relationship journeys are different, they overlap much more than we might think. At their core, both are shaped by the same elements and human behaviours. This framework helps demystify how we move through the journey (and cycles) from interaction to commitment.

We may not think of it this way, but products are also relational journeys. If you can develop an affinity toward something, if it responds to you, and if there’s some level of dependency, there's a relationship. The word relationship means to be linked to another. The reality of modern life is that we’re just as tied to products as we are to each other.

My working theory is that the more we humanize products, the better products we’ll build, and the healthier our relationships with them can be. And, the more we can understand the architecture of trust and intimacy, the more effectively we can navigate relationships. The success of navigating any relationship—with people or products—depends on how we understand the network of data and feedback loops we’ll inevitably encounter on our journey toward commitment.

Before we say yes or no, we move through a series of experiences that help us make sense of how we feel and what we’re willing to give. This is rarely a one-and-done decision. Over time, we come to see that commitment is cyclical. Each round brings us closer or drives us away.

Every journey starts with an interaction. An interaction is an event where two or more people or things have the opportunity to notice, engage with, and respond to each other. An interaction is the first point of contact—a click, a collision, a conversation, a moment of presence. This is the entry point. No relationship, group, or product can exist without it.

The end of any journey typically culminates in a commitment. Commitment to start, continue, change, grow, or let go. It’s a conscious choice to end the cycle or move through it again. Commitment is not exclusive, linear, or guaranteed. That means it can be intercepted or influenced by other people and products. It can be given or earned, but it can also be withdrawn.

Between interaction and commitment, there are various ‘nodes’ that connect the journey in no particular order. These nodes are:

• Interaction

• Connection/Resonance

• Friction (or conflict)

• Response (or resolution)

• Trust

• Intimacy

• Investment

• Bonding

• Love/Affinity

• Commitment

The network of nodes

Connection is when something lands. It’s the spark that creates the desire to go deeper. For people, it’s usually a feeling that emerges from a shared point of interest. For products, it’s a clear message or a magic moment. The realization that something meets a need or solves a problem, or that someone seems to understand you.

Friction is a point of tension or dissonance. It’s that moment where something doesn’t act, function, or respond the way we expected or hoped. There’s a conflict. There’s a challenge we have to overcome. It can be as slight as an inconvenience or as severe as a deep rupture. What it ultimately signals is misalignment, and what it seeds is doubt. Maybe this product won’t solve my problem. Maybe this person isn’t who I thought they were.

Response is the remedy to friction. It often requires listening, care, accountability, and repair. Resolution asks people and products to make concrete changes. The user wants a bug to be fixed, and the friend needs to know their feelings matter. Sometimes, resolution is as simple as changing a line of code; other times, it’s as complex as unpacking layers of history with a person or group.

Trust makes systems and people feel safe and reliable. It’s built on honesty and consistency. It provides comfort, security, and ease. It determines how quick we can move through the cycle and make decisions. In the words of adrienne maree brown, “We move at the speed of trust.” Move means share, give, decide, or purchase. Trust expands or shrinks based on friction and response. It acts like a traffic light letting us know when we should pause, stop, or go.

Intimacy is profound openness and integration. With people, it can be intellectual, spiritual, emotional, or sexual. With products, it’s a high level of adoption and intuitive use. We have intimate relationships with our partners, but we also have intimate relationships with our devices. Intimacy provides a sense of familiarity, allowing us to invest more deeply.

Investment is the willingness to give attention, time, energy, money, or data. It’s a sign of perceived value. For people, it’s showing up and putting in the effort. For products, it’s engagement and purchase. Investment is the first sign of potential long-term commitment.

Bonding happens through shared experience and rituals. It requires vulnerability. For people, it’s making core memories by sharing peak moments of joy and pain. Being in the trenches together or celebrating collective wins. For products, it’s that moment when you feel like your life would be significantly impacted if you could no longer have access to the product.

Love is a sense of deep connection and care. It can be an affinity for something or someone that exists beyond reason. It’s non-transactional and enduring. For people, it’s affection and affirmation (sometimes it turns to devotion). For products, it’s brand loyalty and advocacy. The highest expression of both is expressed through clear, tangible action.

Not everything is a funnel

A ladder is linear. So is a pyramid. So is a funnel. It says this will happen, and then this, and then that. It’s designed to create structure and predictability in an otherwise chaotic process. Sometimes, simplicity is helpful—it enables us to move from point A to point B with relative ease and effectiveness. But simplifying and systematizing everything can also be harmful and ineffective. Avoiding, neglecting, or losing complexity and nuance comes at a cost.

The first step in deciding which framework to use when moving through a process is to understand what the process requires. The more people interact with one another, the more inherently complex the dynamic becomes. Interactions between people and products are less complex. Products that interact with other products are the least complex. I’m speaking primarily from an emotional/psychological perspective, of course. Products have their version of backend complexity.

For anything to progress and realize its full potential, it requires a certain level of commitment, which is usually in direct proportion to the level of trust that exists between the parties. Commitment can be as simple as signing up via email or moving in together. It can also be legally and financially binding—getting married, committing to an annual subscription, or becoming co-founders.

Regardless of how people progress through the journey after the initial interaction, commitment is a long and delicate process. It can take a lot of time and energy to take even the smallest step toward a yes, and very little to pull away from people and things that no longer feel safe, useful, or aligned. Commitment is what all people and products want, and in some cases, what they need to survive and thrive.

How nodes interact to facilitate commitment

The nodes between interaction and commitment are milestones, challenges, and portals that enable us to make meaning. They help us understand who or what we’re engaging with, and enable us to use our discernment to make informed choices. These nodes help us determine how much we can commit, and provide us with data and insights that determine how long we’re willing to stay the course and go through the cycles.

The more trust people have, the more they’re willing to invest. Because the nodes are interdependent, because they function to move us toward commitment, change in one impacts the functions of others, think of them like interconnected dials. When the bonding dial gets turned up, so might the willingness to love. When connection gets turned down, so might intimacy.

Although there’s no right way to move through the journey, there are some predictable patterns. Friction is inevitable. It’ll happen at some point, even if it's being avoided. Resolving friction often leads to trust, which can create space for intimacy. This, in turn, impacts our openness to invest. And so on. However, we can also establish a high level of trust from our first interaction (think referral), or leap straight into bonding with someone (like being under the influence of alcohol), eventually navigating other nodes to progress toward commitment (or not).

It’s rare for friction not to occur early on in any process. Often, it happens and is not consequential enough to address. However, eventually, there will be a point of friction that’s too significant to ignore. Every time friction occurs, trust erodes, connections are impacted, investment decreases, and the process resets, prompting us to reevaluate our level of commitment. The more we experience friction without a meaningful response, the more inauthentic our interactions become, eventually leading to a loss of connection, intimacy, a refusal to invest, and ultimately, the end of commitment.

Why we choose to commit

The process and cycles are much more chaotic with people than they are with products. Products, unlike people, are designed to serve a purpose. They’re not going through drastic evolutions or withholding their whole selves (unless you’re on a freemium). If I use a product, encounter a point of friction, contact support, and the problem gets resolved within a few hours, I’ll probably continue to be a user. If it happens again, I might start to lose trust. If it happens a third time, even if they resolve my issue, I might start looking for alternatives. The amount of friction I’m willing to deal with depends on the severity and frequency of the problem(s), how deeply I'm invested, and what other options are available within my resources.

In the process of evaluation and re-evaluation, whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re always considering impact and effort. How much time, energy, or money is required to opt in and stay the course? What are the consequences of choosing a different path? Our answers are almost always influenced by how committed we already are.

Love, loyalty, and deep investment in people or products can be both freeing and limiting. They make choices more complicated. Think about the person in a relationship who can’t afford to leave. Or the community builder who has built their group on a specific platform, knowing that a migration could mean losing members. Sometimes we stay, not because it’s the right choice, but because the cost of leaving feels too high.

I’m a loyal Apple user. All my current hardware is Apple; it has been for decades. For me to abandon Apple and switch to a competitor would require a major system breakdown or breach of trust. At this point, I’m not even sure if I choose Apple because I genuinely love their products or because I’m used to them. I haven’t tried an alternative in 25 years. The reality is that the effort required to make that shift exceeds what I’m willing to invest.

This is human nature. Deep commitment takes time, mainly because it unfolds in cycles. The greater the investment, the more people involved, the more fragile the network becomes. The sunk cost fallacy is real: the more we’ve put in, the harder it is to walk away. And fear plays a bigger role in the decisions we make than we might admit. Fear of switching products. Fear of losing a friend. Fear of being excluded from a group.

We want to believe that we’re committed because we’ve done our due diligence, we’re clear about our values, we’re really in love, or we’re doing what’s in the best interest of all. But it’s often not the case. The human evaluation system is a complex algorithm with numerous variables, interdependencies, and flaws. Many of our commitments stem from the need to survive—to maintain safety, power, control, security, status, and optics. The more these things consume us, the more vulnerable our decision-making becomes. We have to account for this complexity in any interaction that involves human impact, not just to understand who or what we’re committing to, but why.

The conditions for a strong yes

Sometimes, making the choice to commit is as easy as 1+1=2. Right time, person, place, circumstance, terms and conditions, price—the stars align and we say yes. This usually happens in three cases: we find exactly what we’re looking for, we’re desperate and have no other option, or the stakes are low enough for us to take a chance. Products often use this strategy by creating low-stake commitments, giving people time to build familiarity and trust, and then offering higher-stake commitments.

Once we’re done with the ‘trial,’ we get to a point where we have to deepen our commitment or walk away. If we’ve done a thorough job of moving through the nodes, our decision may be obvious, but if we’ve skipped steps or neglected the deep work required to build trust or intimacy, we may find ourselves unable to give (or get) the level of commitment required at the time it’s presented to us.

Commitment comes down to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. ‘I don’t know’ reveals one of two things: ‘I don’t have enough data’ or ‘I’m afraid’. We may know a product is right for us, but we’re hesitant to make the financial investment. We may not have enough data to know whether we want to coparent with someone, so we stay in limbo. We may want to start a business, but we’re not ready to lose the consistent income from our job. All of these can be expressed as ‘I don’t know,’ but if we unpack the layers, we usually find that fear or insufficient information is the underlying cause.

Which is why, to decide to commit to anything or anyone, we need to be well informed. Sometimes we come across products that embellish what they do, promising to solve all our pain points and convincing us to sign up for their platform, only to realize we’ve been misled once we dig deeper. People are not as easy to decode. The human desire for safety, security, and belonging can drive us to withhold information, obscure facts, or soften the severity of a situation to avoid consequences, sustain influence, or minimize damage. It is in our nature to protect that which supports our reputation, livelihood, and well-being. It’s also in our nature to protect our resources.

But protection isn’t the same as alignment. Sometimes, to protect ourselves or others, we distort the very things that would allow us to make better decisions. We hold back the truth, delay the conversation, or disguise our intentions to buy time, reduce risk, or stay in control. The problem is, commitment thrives on clarity. And clarity can’t exist without truth.

Commitment requires belief. The belief that something will work, that someone will change, that the love is genuine, that the benefits are true. Storytelling and marketing serve as tools to help us communicate value and strengthen belief, making saying yes the obvious choice. The gap between what we promise and what we deliver is the real marker of integrity. The more something or someone behaves in accordance with their promise and principles, the more we’re willing to trust and invest. We might be able to fool people initially (or for a while), but they’ll eventually notice the discrepancy between words and actions.

Commitment ultimately comes down to three things: transparency, consistency, and alignment. Transparency helps us see people and products for what they truly are. Consistency provides the proof that they’ll keep showing up the way they say they will. And alignment is the sense of peace that makes us stay.

The more authentic we can be on the journey, the easier it is for people to opt in or out of a commitment. Our resources are limited. There are only so many people and products we can invest in, and even fewer we’re willing to commit to long-term. We owe it to ourselves and each other to be honest and intentional, because what we want, as partners, friends, leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs, is not just a yes but a strong yes. A strong yes can withstand the storms of friction, outside influence, and interception. There’s no stronger yes than a yes based on truth.

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