Elizabeth Gilbert: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

Clearly, I am not such a being. In the past, I was given the clear choice between honoring my vow and honoring my own life, and I chose myself over the promise. I refuse to say that this necessarily makes me an unethical person (one could argue that choosing liberation over misery is a way of honoring life’s miracle), but it did bring up a dilemma when it came to getting married to Felipe. While I was just Hebrew enough to dearly wish that I would stay married forever this time (yes, let’s just go ahead and use those shaming words: this time), I had not yet found a way to respect wholeheartedly the institution of matrimony itself. I had not yet found a place for myself within the history of marriage where I felt that I belonged, where I felt that I could recognize myself. This absence of respect and self-​recognition caused me to fear that not even I would believe my own sworn vows on my own wedding day.

Trying to sort this out, I brought up the question with Felipe. Now I should say here that Felipe was considerably more relaxed about all this than I was. While he didn’t hold any more affection for the institution of marriage than I did, he kept telling me, “At this point, darling, it’s all just a game. The government has set the rules and now we have to play their game in order to get what we want. Personally, I’m willing to play any game whatsoever, as long as it means that I ultimately can live my life with you in peace.”

That mode of thinking worked for him, but gamesmanship wasn’t what I was looking for here; I needed a certain level of earnestness and authenticity. Still, Felipe could see my agitation on this subject, and-God bless the man-he was kind enough to listen to me muse for quite a long while on the rival philosophies of Western civilization and how they were affecting my views on matrimony. But when I asked Felipe whether he felt himself to be more Greek or more Hebrew in his thinking, he replied, “Darling-none of this really applies to me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I’m not Greek or Hebrew.”

“What are you then?”

“I’m Brazilian.”

“But what does that even mean?”

Felipe laughed. “Nobody knows! That’s the wonderful thing about being Brazilian. It doesn’t mean anything! So you can use your Brazilianness as an excuse to live your life any way you want. It’s a brilliant strategy, actually. It’s taken me far.”

“So how does that help me?”

“Perhaps it can help you to relax! You’re about to marry a Brazilian. Why don’t you start thinking like a Brazilian?”

“How?”

“By choosing what you want! That’s the Brazilian way, isn’t it? We borrow everyone’s ideas, mix it all up, and then we create something new out of it. Listen-what is it that you like so much about the Greeks?”

“Their sense of humanity,” I said.

“And what is it that you like-if anything-about the Hebrews?”

“Their sense of honor,” I said.

“Okay, so that’s settled-we’ll take them both. Humanity and honor. We’ll make a marriage out of that combination. We’ll call it a Brazilian blend. We’ll shape this thing to our own code.”

“Can we just do that?”

“Darling!” Felipe said, and he took my face between his hands with a sudden, frustrated urgency. “When are you going to understand? As soon as we secure this bloody visa and get ourselves safely married back in America, we can do whatever the hell we want.”

Can we, though?

I prayed that Felipe was right, but I wasn’t sure. My deepest fear about marriage, when I dug right down to the very bottom of it, was that matrimony would end up shaping us far more than we could ever possibly shape it. All my months of studying marriage had only caused me to fear this potentiality more than ever. I had come to believe that matrimony as an institution was impressively powerful. It was certainly far bigger and older and deeper and more complicated than Felipe or I could ever possibly be. No matter how modern and sophisticated Felipe and I might feel, I feared we would step onto the assembly line of marriage and soon enough find ourselves molded into spouses- crammed into some deeply conventional shape that benefited society, even if it did not entirely benefit us.

All this was disquieting because, as annoying as it may sound, I do like to think of myself as vaguely bohemian. I’m not an anarchist or anything, but it does comfort me to regard my life in terms of a certain instinctive resistance to conformity. Felipe, to be honest, likes to think of himself in much the same way. Okay, let’s all be truthful here and admit that most of us probably like to think of ourselves in these terms, right? It’s charming, after all, to imagine oneself as an eccentric nonconformist, even when one has just purchased a coffeepot. So maybe the whole idea of bending under the convention of marriage stung a bit for me-stung at that stubborn old level of anti-​authoritarian Greek pride. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would ever get around that issue.

That is, until I discovered Ferdinand Mount.

Pawing through the Web one day for further clues on marriage, I stumbled on a curious-​looking academic work titled The Subversive Family by a British author named Ferdinand Mount. I promptly ordered the book and had my sister ship it to me in Bali. I loved the title and was certain this text would relay inspiring stories of couples who had somehow figured out ways to beat the system and undermine social authority, keeping true to their rebel roots, all within the institution of marriage. Perhaps I would find my role models here!

Indeed, subversion was the topic of this book, but not at all in the manner I’d expected. This was hardly a seditious manifesto, which shouldn’t have been surprising given that it turns out Ferdinand Mount (beg pardon-make that Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet) is a conservative columnist for the London Sunday Times. I can honestly say that I never would have ordered this book had I known that fact in advance. But I’m happy that I did find it, because sometimes salvation comes to us in the most unlikely of forms, and Sir Mount (surmount?) did provide me with a sort of rescue, offering up an idea about matrimony that was radically different from anything I’d unearthed before.

Mount-I’ll eschew his title from here on out-suggests that all marriages are automatic acts of subversion against authority. (All nonarranged marriages, that is. Which is to say all nontribal, nonclannish, non-​property-​based marriages. Which is to say Western marriage.) The families that grow out of such willful and personal unions are subversive units, too. As Mount puts it: “The family is a subversive organization. In fact, it is the ultimate and only consistently subversive organization. Only the family has continued throughout history, and still continues, to undermine the State. The family is the enduring permanent enemy of all hierarchies, churches and ideologies. Not only dictators, bishops and commissars but also humble parish priests and cafe intellectuals find themselves repeatedly coming up against the stony hostility of the family and its determination to resist interference to the last.”

Now that is some seriously strong language, but Mount builds a compelling case. He suggests that because couples in nonarranged marriages join together for such deeply private reasons, and because those couples create such secret lives for themselves within their union, they are innately threatening to anybody who wants to rule the world. The first goal of any given authoritarian body is to inflict control on any given population, through coercion, indoctrination, intimidation, or propaganda. But authority figures, much to their frustration, have never been able to entirely control, or even monitor, the most secret intimacies that pass between two people who sleep together on a regular basis.