Elizabeth Gilbert: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

While Felipe jotted down the phone numbers of his lawyer, his grown children, and his business partners so that I could alert everyone to his situation, I emptied out my handbag, frantically looking for things I could give him to keep him more comfortable in jail: chewing gum, all my cash, a bottle of water, a photograph of us together, and a novel I had been reading on the airplane titled, aptly enough, The People’s Act of Love.

Then Felipe’s eyes filled with tears and he said, “Thank you for coming into my life. No matter what happens now, no matter what you decide to do next, just know that you’ve given me the two most joyful years I’ve ever known and I will never forget you.”

I realized in a flash: Dear God, the man thinks I might leave him now. His reaction surprised me and touched me, but more than anything it shamed me. It had not crossed my mind, since Officer Tom had laid out the option, that I would not now marry Felipe and save him from exile-but apparently it had crossed his mind that he might now be ditched. He genuinely feared that I might abandon him, leaving him high and dry, broke and busted. Had I earned such a reputation? Was I really known, even within the boundaries of our small love story, as somebody who jumps ship at the first obstacle? But were Felipe’s fears entirely unjustified, given my history? If our situations had been reversed, I would never have doubted for a moment the solidity of his loyalties, or his willingness to sacrifice virtually anything on my account. Could he be certain of the same steadfastness from me?

I had to admit that if this state of affairs had taken place ten or fifteen years earlier, I almost certainly would have bailed out on my endangered partner. I am sorry to confess that I possessed a scant amount of honor in my youth, if any, and behaving in a flighty and thoughtless manner was a bit of a specialty of mine. But being a person of character matters to me now, and matters only more as I grow older. At that moment, then-and I had only one moment left alone with Felipe-I did the only right thing by this man whom I adored. I vowed to him-drilling the words into his ear so he would grasp my earnestness-that I would not leave him, that I would do whatever it took to fix things, and that even if things could not somehow be fixed in America, we would always stay together anyhow, somewhere, wherever in the world that had to be.

Officer Tom came back into the room.

At the last instant, Felipe whispered to me, “I love you so much, I will even marry you.”

“And I love you so much,” I promised, “that I will even marry you.”

Then the nice Homeland Security people separated us and handcuffed Felipe and led him away-first to jail and then off to exile.

As I flew home alone that night to our now-​obsolete little existence in Philadelphia, I considered more soberly what I had just promised. I was surprised to find that I was not feeling weepy or panicky; somehow the situation seemed too grave for any of that. What I felt, instead, was a ferocious sense of focus-a sense that this situation must be addressed with the utmost seriousness. In the space of only a few hours, my life with Felipe had been neatly flipped upside down, as though by some great cosmic spatula. And now, it seemed, we were engaged to be married. This had certainly been a strange and rushed engagement ceremony. It felt more like something out of Kafka than out of Austen. Yet the engagement was nonetheless official because it needed to be.

Fine, then. So be it. I would certainly not be the first woman in my family’s history who ever had to get married because of a serious situation-although my situation, at least, did not involve accidental pregnancy. Still, the prescription was the same: Tie the knot, and do it quickly. So that’s what we would do. But here was the real problem, which I identified that night all alone on the plane back home to Philadelphia: I had no idea what marriage was.

I had already made this mistake-entering into marriage without understanding anything whatsoever about the institution-once before in my life. In fact, I had jumped into my first marriage, at the totally unfinished age of twenty-​five, much the same way that a Labrador jumps into a swimming pool-with exactly that much preparation and foresight. Back when I was twenty-​five, I was so irresponsible that I probably should not have been allowed to choose my own toothpaste, much less my own future, and so this carelessness, as you can imagine, came at a dear cost. I reaped the consequences in spades, six years later, in the grim setting of a divorce court.

Looking back on the occasion of my first wedding day, I’m reminded of Richard Aldington’s novel Death of a Hero, in which he ponders his two young lovers on their ill-​fated wedding day: “Can one tabulate the ignorances, the relevant ignorances, of George Augustus and Isabel when they pledged themselves together until death do us part?” I, too, was once a giddy young bride very much like Aldington’s Isabel, about whom he wrote: “What she didn’t know included almost the whole range of human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she did know.”

Now, though-at the considerably less giddy age of thirty-​seven-I was not convinced that I knew very much more than ever about the realities of institutionalized companionship. I had failed at marriage and thus I was terrified of marriage, but I’m not sure this made me an expert on marriage; this only made me an expert on failure and terror, and those particular fields are already crowded with experts. Yet destiny had intervened and was demanding marriage from me, and I’d learned enough from life’s experiences to understand that destiny’s interventions can sometimes be read as invitations for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn’t take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.

So it slowly dawned on me on the airplane out of Dallas-my world now turned back-​to-​front, my lover exiled, the two of us having effectively been sentenced to marry-that perhaps I should use this time to somehow make peace with the idea of matrimony before I jumped into it once again. Perhaps it would be wise to put a little effort into unraveling the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is.

So that is what I did. For the next ten months-while traveling with Felipe in a state of rootless exile and while working like a dog to get him back into America so we could safely wed (getting married in Australia or anywhere else in the world, Officer Tom had warned us, would merely irritate the Homeland Security Department and slow down our immigration process even more)-the only thing I thought about, the only thing I read about, and pretty much the only thing I talked about with anybody was the perplexing subject of matrimony.

I enlisted my sister back home in Philadelphia (who, conveniently, is an actual historian) to send me boxes of books about marriage. Wherever Felipe and I happened to be staying, I would lock myself up in our hotel room to study the books, passing untold hours in the company of such eminent matrimonial scholars as Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Cott-writers whose names I had never heard before but who now became my heroes and teachers. To be honest, all this studying made me a lousy tourist. During those months of travel, Felipe and I fetched up in many beautiful and fascinating places, but I’m afraid I didn’t always pay close attention to our surroundings. This stretch of traveling never had the feeling of a carefree adventure anyhow. It felt more like an expulsion, a hegira. Traveling because you cannot go back home again, because one of you is not legally allowed to go home again, can never be an enjoyable endeavor.