Elizabeth Gilbert - Committed - A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

In the end, I found a certain comfort in recognizing that I could not-cannot-write a book that would satisfy millions of readers. Not deliberately, anyhow. The fact is, I do not know how to write a beloved best seller on demand. If I knew how to write beloved best sellers on demand, I can assure you that I would have been writing them all along, because it would have made my life a lot easier and more comfortable ages ago. But it doesn’t work that way-or at least not for writers like me. We write only the books that we need to write, or are able to write, and then we must release them, recognizing that whatever happens to them next is somehow none of our business.

For a multitude of personal reasons, then, the book that I needed to write was exactly this book-another memoir (with extra socio-​historical bonus sections!) about my efforts to make peace with the complicated institution of marriage. The subject matter was never in doubt; it’s just that I had trouble there for a while finding my voice. Ultimately I discovered that the only way I could write again at all was to vastly limit-at least in my own imagination-the number of people I was writing for. So I started completely over. And I did not write this version of Committed for millions of readers. Instead, I wrote it for exactly twenty-​seven readers. To be precise, the names of those twenty-​seven readers are: Maude, Carole, Catherine, Ann, Darcey, Deborah, Susan, Sofie, Cree, Cat, Abby, Linda, Bernadette, Jen, Jana, Sheryl, Rayya, Iva, Erica, Nichelle, Sandy, Anne, Patricia, Tara, Laura, Sarah, and Margaret.

Those twenty-​seven women constitute my small but critically important circle of female friends, relatives, and neighbors. They range in age from their early twenties to their midnineties. One of them happens to be my grandmother; another is my stepdaughter. One is my oldest friend; another is my newest friend. One is freshly married; another two or so sorely wish to be married; a few have recently remarried; one in particular is unspeakably grateful never to have married at all; another just ended a nearly decade-​long relationship with a woman. Seven are mothers; two (as of this writing) are pregnant; the rest-for a variety of reasons and with a wide range of feelings about it-are childless. Some are homemakers; others are professionals; a couple of them, bless their hearts, are homemakers and professionals. Most are white; a few are black; two were born in the Middle East; one is Scandinavian; two are Australian; one is South American; another is Cajun. Three are devoutly religious; five are utterly uninterested in all questions of divinity; most are somewhat spiritually perplexed; the others have somehow, over the years, brokered their own private agreements with God. All these women have an above-​average sense of humor. All of them, at some point in their lives, have experienced heartbreaking loss.

Over many years, over many cups of tea and booze, I have sat with one or another of these dear souls and wondered aloud over questions of marriage, intimacy, sexuality, divorce, fidelity, family, responsibility, and autonomy. This book was built on the bones of those conversations. While I pieced together various pages of this story, I would find myself literally speaking aloud to these friends, relatives, and neighbors-responding to questions that sometimes dated back decades, or posing new questions of my own. This book could never have come into existence without the influence of those twenty-​seven extraordinary women and I am enormously grateful for their collective presence. As ever, it has been an education and a comfort just to have them in the room.

ELIZABETH GILBERT New Jersey, 2009

Late one afternoon in the summer of 2006, I found myself in a small village in northern Vietnam, sitting around a sooty kitchen fire with a number of local women whose language I did not speak, trying to ask them questions about marriage.

For several months already, I had been traveling across Southeast Asia with a man who was soon to become my husband. I suppose the conventional term for such an individual would be “fiance,” but neither one of us was very comfortable with that word, so we weren’t using it. In fact, neither one of us was very comfortable with this whole idea of matrimony at all. Marriage was not something we had ever planned with each other, nor was it something either of us wanted. Yet providence had interfered with our plans, which was why we were now wandering haphazardly across Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia, all the while making urgent-even desperate-efforts to return to America and wed.

The man in question had been my lover, my sweetheart, for over two years by then, and in these pages I shall call him Felipe. Felipe is a kind, affectionate Brazilian gentleman, seventeen years my senior, whom I’d met on another journey (an actual planned journey) that I’d taken around the world a few years earlier in an effort to mend a severely broken heart. Near the end of those travels, I’d encountered Felipe, who had been living quietly and alone in Bali for years, nursing his own broken heart. What had followed was attraction, then a slow courtship, and then, much to our mutual wonderment, love.

Our resistance to marriage, then, had nothing to do with an absence of love. On the contrary, Felipe and I loved each other unreservedly. We were happy to make all sorts of promises to stay together faithfully forever. We had even sworn lifelong fidelity to each other already, although quite privately. The problem was that the two of us were both survivors of bad divorces, and we’d been so badly gutted by our experiences that the very idea of legal marriage-with anyone, even with such nice people as each other-filled us with a heavy sense of dread.

As a rule, of course, most divorces are pretty bad (Rebecca West observed that “getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking very valuable china”), and our divorces had been no exception. On the mighty cosmic one-​to-​ten Scale of Divorce Badness (where one equals an amicably executed separation, and ten equals… well, an actual execution), I would probably rate my own divorce as something like a 7.5. No suicides or homicides had resulted, but aside from that, the rupture had been about as ugly a proceeding as two otherwise well-​mannered people could have possibly manifested. And it had dragged on for more than two years.

As for Felipe, his first marriage (to an intelligent, professional Australian woman) had ended almost a decade before we’d met in Bali. His divorce had unfolded graciously enough at the time, but losing his wife (and access to the house and kids and almost two decades of history that came along with her) had inflicted on this good man a lingering legacy of sadness, with special emphases on regret, isolation, and economic anxiety.

Our experiences, then, had left the two of us taxed, troubled, and decidedly suspicious of the joys of holy wedded matrimony. Like anyone who has ever walked through the valley of the shadow of divorce, Felipe and I had each learned firsthand this distressing truth: that every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-​coiled makings of complete catastrophe. We had also learned that marriage is an estate that is very much easier to enter than it is to exit. Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you-the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love-may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State, and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave. Thus, you can feasibly find yourself trapped for months or even years in a loveless legal bond that has come to feel rather like a burning building. A burning building in which you, my friend, are handcuffed to a radiator somewhere down in the basement, unable to wrench yourself free, while the smoke billows forth and the rafters are collapsing…