My thoughts on "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage", by Elizabeth Gilbert
This book is basically a sequel to "Eat, Pray, Love", picking up where that book left off. The first book ends with a compromise, in which she finds love without needing to risk returning to the perils of marriage. Since marriage is just an institution, it is not required to feel spiritually and emotionally bonded, she embarks on a journey of love across international boundaries, free from the M-word.
However, George Bush changes her plans. In the beginning of this book she explains how she and her partner had maintained their international love-affair just fine for several years, with him staying in the US on 3-month visas, then leaving the country, and then returning shortly later on another 3-month visa. During his time in the US they lived in bliss in a small house on the East Coast. What could possibly go wrong?
One day her partner flies into the US airport and is detained by the Dept. of Homeland Security, accusing him of abusing his visa, by constantly renewing it. They deport him out of the country, and tell Elizabeth Gilbert the only way he might be able to return to the US is for them to get married. Thus begins her self-analysis of this fearful word, based on her past experience.
She flies out to join her partner, and she spends the next year or so living abroad with him in different countries. Since she's an author she can work remotely, and they spend their time moving around a lot, to many different countries. Along the way, she interviews everyong she can find on their thoughts on marriage.
She wants to understand why all cultures, everywhere on the planet, wraps some kind of ceremony and legal structure around this human experience. Why does every culture take a deeply internal experience and express it in externally binding ways, and how do people in different cultures experience marriage?
She encounters a wide range of views. At one end of the spectrum, she talks to some old ladies in the mountains of Vietnam and she asks them "When did you first know you loved your husband?" Their reaction was to laugh at her. They all thought this question was funny. In their culture, marriage had little connection with emotional bonding. The women of a village spend most of their time together, and the men spend their time together, mixing only for meals and sleeping.
A woman in this culture aspires to grow up, farm a plot of land, have some cows, a nice hut, and a father for her children. They describe their husbands as good providers, but they don't expect to bond with them on any deeper level. If they want emotional support, bonding, or any deeper spiritual connections they get this from the other women in their lives - their sisters, their cousins, their aunts, their friends. They don't expect to get this from men, and they find the idea silly.
She then talks to European women, and she ponders the contrast. In Western cultures, when a person describes the narrative of their life, at some point they expect to meet someone with whom they form a very deep bond, a soul-mate. They will publically express their commitment - their marriage - and they expect this person to be sort of like a mirror, in to which they can peer deeply and have their deep emotional and spiritual bonding needs met. This deep level of bonding is assumed to be a necessary part of this experience, and when this fails they can experience deep depression. If a marriage fails in the mountains of Vietnam they will feel the same as if they lost their dairy cows, or a tractor, and will feel sad but since they have far less expectations from a marriage they rarely react as dramatically as Westerners can.
Gilbert finds a lot of variations in views along this spectrum as she travels aruond the world asking questions, and she wonders if the solution to her own angst is to simply lower her expectations of marriage in order to feel comfortable with it. But she can't accept this. She acknwledges that she is a product of Western expectations and she can't just put them aside.
She also researches the history of marriage, which is an enlightening part of the book. There is not a single culture in the entire world that does not treat marriage as something that is not proclaimed in some kind of public ceremony, and which is wrapped up in some kind of legal or financial constraints. She tries to understand this unieversal instinct, and how it has changed over time.
For example, she finds that for centuries, the Church actively discouraged people from getting married. Starting with the letters of Saint Paul, who argued that a celibate life was the highest goal, to the Middle Ages, the Church either discouraged marriage or it had little to do with the institution. Marriage was not sanctioned in any religious way, but was recognized as mostly a legal arrangement. In the Middle Ages, if 2 peasants wanted to marry, they made a public annoncement in some form of ceremony, and that was it. Gilbert wonders why even this was necessary: since the nature of being a soul-mate is internal, why is it expressed externally at all? But it is, even in the total absence of religious sanctions.
She points out the irony with the modern religious reactions to the issue of gay-marriage, in America at least. People will often argue that traditional, heterosexual marriage is an ancient institution that has never changed. But it has changed, a lot. It has not remained the same, it has changed, evolved, and religion has not always been part of the equation. Marriage is an evolving institution.
For example, you will often see bumper-stickers on cars that say something like "Marriage equals one man plus one woman". But if you look at about 90% of human history, the traditional marriage around most of the world has been "One man plus many women". Polygamy is much older than monogamy, so if traditionalists were really consistent they should be arguing to legalize polygamy, since it is the most traditional form of marriage...!
But after surveying the history of marriage she comes back to her personal question: how can she possibly re-enter into an institution that she has failed painfully at? Why should she voluntarilly submit to the restrictions that marriage places on people, and on women in particular? She repeats this question many times throghougt the book, while interviewing yet more people.
She finally comes to a resolution at the end of the book, which satisfies her. Without revealing what this solution is, she admits to being counter-cultural in her basic outlook on life. She does not want to let her life be dictated by status-quo attitudes. She needs to feel like she is living on her own terms, and if these terms are on the edge of the status-quo culture, this is probably a good sign.
She finds a solution that fits in to this outlook on life, and she agrees to re-enter the institution, feeling much safer in her decision this time around.
I have not experienced the collapse of this insitution in my life, and I hope I never do. But I think reading her experience will make marriage much clearer to anyone, married or not. Of all aspects of life, this is one experience that should be understood as well as experienced on a purely emotional level. And Gilbert is a very effective guide.