Elizabeth Gilbert - Committed - A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

Yes! Think!

I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod-and I’d never even heard of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren’t there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-​mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, “You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy.” But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.

Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-​mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still…

My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn’t really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, “What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?”

I committed to no such thing.

She tried again: “What if I just happened to throw a big party while you guys were at my house, but you and Felipe wouldn’t even have to come downstairs? You could just lock yourselves upstairs with the lights off. And when I made the wedding toast, I would casually wave my champagne glass in the general direction of the attic door? Is even that too threatening?”

Oddly, indefensibly, perversely: yes.

When I tried to sort out my resistance to a public wedding ceremony, I had to admit that part of the issue was simple embarrassment. How very awkward to stand in front of one’s family and friends (many of whom had been guests at one’s first wedding) and swear solemn vows for life all over again. Hadn’t they all seen this film already? One’s credibility does begin to tarnish after too much of this sort of thing. And Felipe, too, had once before sworn lifetime vows only to leave the marriage after seventeen years. What a pair we made! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One divorce may be regarded as a misfortune, but two begins to smack of carelessness.

Furthermore, I could never forget what the etiquette columnist Miss Manners has to say on this very subject. While expressing her conviction that people should be allowed to marry as many times as they like, she does believe that each of us is entitled to only one big fanfare wedding ceremony per lifetime. (This may seem a bit overly Protestant and repressive, I know-but curiously enough, the Hmong feel the same way. When I’d asked that grandmother back in Vietnam about the traditional Hmong procedure for second marriages, she had replied, “Second weddings are exactly the same as first weddings-except with not as many pigs.”)

Moreover, a second or third big wedding puts family members and friends in the awkward position of wondering if they must shower repeat brides with gifts and abundant attention all over again. The answer, apparently, is no. As Miss Manners once coolly explained to a reader, the proper technique for congratulating a serial bride-​to-​be is to eschew all the gifts and galas and simply write the lady a note expressing how very delighted you are for her happiness, wishing her all the luck in the world, and being very careful to avoid using the words “this time.”

My God, how those two indicting little words-this time-make me cringe. Yet it was true. The recollections of last time felt all too recent for me, all too painful. Also, I didn’t like the idea that guests at a bride’s second wedding are just as likely to be thinking about her first spouse as they are to be thinking about her new spouse-and that the bride, too, will probably be remembering her ex-​husband on that day. First spouses, I have learned, don’t ever really go away-even if you aren’t speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism. “We know you better than you know yourselves” is what the ghosts of our ex-​spouses like to remind us, and what they know about us, unfortunately, is often not pretty.

“There are four minds in the bed of a divorced man who marries a divorced woman,” says a fourth-​century Talmudic document-and indeed, our former spouses do often haunt our beds. I still dream about my ex-​husband, for instance, far more than I would ever have imagined back when I left him. Usually these dreams are agitating and confusing. On rare occasions, they are warm or conciliatory. It doesn’t really matter, though: I can neither control the dreams nor stop them. He shows up in my subconscious whenever he pleases, entering without knocking. He still has the keys to that house. Felipe dreams about his ex-​wife, too. I dream about Felipe’s ex-​wife, for heaven’s sake. I sometimes even dream about my ex-​husband’s new wife, whom I have never met, whose photograph I have never even seen-yet she appears in my dreams sometimes, and we converse there. (In fact, we hold summit meetings.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in this world my ex-​husband’s second wife is intermittently dreaming about me-trying in her subconscious to work out the strange folds and seams of our connection.

My friend Ann-divorced twenty years ago and happily remarried since to a wonderful, older man-assures me that this will all go away over time. She swears that the ghosts do recede, that there will come a time when I never think about my ex-​husband again. I don’t know, though. I find that hard to picture. I can imagine it easing, but I can’t imagine it ever going away completely, especially because my first marriage ended so sloppily, with so much left unresolved. My ex-​husband and I never once agreed on what had gone wrong with our relationship. It was shocking, our total absence of consensus. Such completely different worldviews are probably also an indication of why we should never have been together in the first place; we were the only two eye-​witnesses to the death of our marriage, and we each walked away with a completely different testimony as to what had happened.

Thus, perhaps, the dim sense of haunting. So we lead separate lives now, my ex-​husband and I, yet he still visits my dreams in the form of an avatar who probes and debates and reconsiders from a thousand different angles an eternal docket of unfinished business. It’s awkward. It’s eerie. It’s ghostly, and I didn’t want to provoke that ghost with a big loud ceremony or celebration.

Maybe another reason Felipe and I were so resistant to exchanging ceremonial vows was that we felt we’d already done it. We’d already exchanged vows in an utterly private ceremony of our own devising. This had happened back in Knoxville, in April 2005-back when Felipe first came to live with me in that odd decaying hotel on the square. We had gone out one day and bought ourselves a pair of simple gold rings. Then we’d written out our promises to each other and read them aloud. We put the rings on each other’s fingers, sealed our commitment with a kiss and tears, and that was it. Both of us had felt like that was enough. In all the ways that mattered, then, we believed that we were already married.

Nobody saw this happen except the two of us (and-one hopes-God). And needless to say, nobody respected those vows of ours in any way whatsoever (except the two of us and-again, one hopes-God). I invite you to imagine how the deputies of the Homeland Security Department, for instance, might have responded back at the Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport if I had tried to convince them that a private commitment ceremony held in a Knoxville hotel room had somehow rendered Felipe and me as good as legally married.