Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert is a great book that follows her previous book- Eat, Pray, Love. It continues the story of Felipe, the man she met while in Indonesia. They swore eternal fidelity to each other, but swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. They had an issue with the US Government and Felipe was detained. They were faced with the decision of getting married or he wouldn’t be allowed into the country again. Elizabeth Gilbert then decided to delve into the topic of marriage and this book provides historical research, interviews, and personal reflection about the institution of marriage. 

Below are my favorite excerpts from the book: 

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. 

In the early years of Western civilization, men and women married each other mostly for the purpose of physical safety. In the time before organized states, in the wild B.C. days of the Fertile Crescent, the fundamental working unit of society was the family. From the family came all your basic social welfare needs- not just companionship and procreation, but also food, housing, education, religious guidance, medical care, and, perhaps most importantly, defense. It was a hazardous world out there in the Cradle of Civilization. To be alone was to be targeted for death. 

For approximately 10 centuries, Christianity itself did not see marriage as being either holy or sanctified. Marriage was certainly not modeled as the ideal state of moral being. On the contrary, the early Christian fathers regarded the habit of marriage as a somewhat repugnant worldly affair that had everything to do with sex and females and taxes and property, and nothing whatsoever to do with higher concerns of divinity.

The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as “ traditional”  didn’t come into being until the 19th century- not until a Teenage Queen Victoria walked down the aisle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting a fashion trend that has never gone out of style since. 

The church’s strict new prohibitions against divorce turned marriage into a life sentence- something it had never really been before, not even in ancient Hebrew society. And divorce remained illegal in Europe until the 16th century, when Henry the VIII brought back the custom in grand style. But for about two centuries there- and for much longer in countries that remained Catholic after the Protestant Reformation- unhappy couples no longer had any legal escape from their marriages should things go wrong. 

Coverture, then, was not so much a blending of two individuals as a spooky and almost voo-doo like “twicing” of the man, wherein his powers doubled and his wife’s evaporated completely. Combined with  strict new anti-divorce policies of the church, marriage became, by the 13th century, an institution that entombed and then he erased female victims- particularly among the gentry. One can only imagine how lonely the lives of those women must have become once they were so thoroughly eradicated as humans. How on Earth did they fill their days? Over the course of their paralyzing marriages, as Balzac wrote of such unfortunate ladies, “ boredom overtakes them, and they give themselves up to religion, or cats, or little dogs, or other manias which are offensively only to God”. 

It wasn’t until the year 1975, for instance, that the married women of Connecticut- including my own mother- were legally allowed to take out loans or open checking accounts without the written permission of their husbands. It wasn’t until 1984 that the State of New York overturned an ugly legal notion called “ the marital rape exemption,”  which had previously permitted a man to do anything he liked sexually to his wife, no matter how violent or coercive, since her body belonged to him- since, in effect, she was him. 

In 1907, a law was passed by the United States Congress stating that any natural born American woman who married a foreign-born man would have to surrender her American citizenship upon her marriage and automatically become a citizen of her husband’s nation- whether she wanted to or not. Though the courts conceded that this wasn’t pleasant, they maintained for many years that it was necessary. As the Supreme Court ruled on the matter, if you were to permit an American woman to keep her own nationality at the moment of marriage to a foreigner, you would essentially be allowing the wife’s citizenship to trump the husband’s citizenship. In doing so, you would be suggesting that the woman was in possession of something that rendered her superior to her husband- in even one small regard– and this was obviously unconscionable.

Needless to say, the law did not hold the reverse to be true. If a natural born American man married a foreign-born woman, the husband was certainly allowed to keep his citizenship, and his bride would certainly be allowed to become an American citizen herself- that is, so long as she met the official naturalization requirements for foreign-born wives ( which is to say, so long as she was not a negro, a mulatto, a member of “the Malay race”,  or any other kind of creature that the United States of America expressly deemed undesirable). 

Interracial marriage, which was illegal in the United States until fairly recently. For most of American history, falling in love with the person of the wrong color could land you in jail, or worse. All this changed in 1967, with the case of a rural Virginia couple named- poetically enough-  the Lovings. Richard Loving was white; his wife, Mildred- whom he had adored since he was 17 years old- was black. When they decided to marry in 1958, interracial unions were still illegal in the Commonwealth of Virginia as well as in 15 other American states. so the young couple sealed their vows in Washington DC instead. But when they returned home after their honeymoon, they were swiftly apprehended by local police, who broke into the Loving’s bedroom in the middle of the night and arrested them (the police had hoped to find the couple having sex, so they could also charge them with the crime of interracial intercourse, but no luck; the Lovings were only sleeping).  Still, the fact that they had married each other at all rendered the couple guilty enough to haul off to jail. Richard and Mildred petitioned the courts for the right to uphold their District of Columbia marriage, but the Virginia state judge struck down their wedding vows, helpfully explaining in his ruling that “ almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix”. 

Ultimately, then, it is the business of America’s courts, not America’s churches, to decide the rules of matrimonial law.

Everywhere, in every single society, all across the world, all across time, whenever a conservative culture of arranged marriage is replaced by an expressive culture of people choosing their own partners based on love, divorce rates will immediately begin to skyrocket.

So when we talk about how love-based marriages can lead to higher divorce rates, this is not something to be taken lightly. The emotional, financial, and even physical cost of failed love can destroy individuals and families. People stalk, injure, and kill their ex-spouses, and even when it doesn’t reach the extreme of physical violence, divorce is a psychological and emotional and economic wrecking ball- as anyone who has ever been in, or even near, a failing marriage can attest. 

Maybe divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love- or at least, for daring to link love to such a vital social contract as matrimony. Maybe it is not love and marriage that go together like a horse and carriage after all. Maybe it is love and divorce that go together… like a  carriage and a horse. 

From an anthropological perspective, the real dilemma of modern relationships is this: if you honestly want to have a society in which people choose their own partners on the basis of personal affection, then you must prepare yourself for the inevitable. There will be broken hearts; there will be broken lives.

It’s been famously said that second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. It seems to me that first marriages are the more hope-drenched affairs, awash in vast expectations and easy optimism. Second marriages are cloaked, I think, in something else”: a respect for forces that are bigger than us, maybe. A respect that perhaps even approaches awe. 

Real, sane, mature love- the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school- is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect. and the word “ respect,”  from the Latin Respicere (“two gaze at”), suggests that you can actually see the person who is standing next to you, something you absolutely cannot do from within the swirling mists of romantic delusion. Reality exits the stage the moment that infatuation enters, and we might soon find ourselves doing all sorts of crazy things that we would never have considered doing in any sane state. 

When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves,” What was I thinking?”  and the answer is usually: You weren’t. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness “ narcissistic love”.

That kind of love makes you feel super heroic, mythical, beyond human, immortal. you radiate life; you need no sleep; your beloved fills your lungs like oxygen. And those experiences have turned out in the end in pain. 

How do you guard against such things? The only comfort I’ve ever found on this subject came to me through reading the work of Shirley P. Glass, a psychologist who spent much of her career studying marital infidelity. Her question was always, “ How did it happen?”  How did it happen that good people, decent people, even Harry Truman-like people, find themselves suddenly swept away by currents of desire, destroying lives and families without ever really intending to? We’re not talking about serial cheaters here, but trustworthy people who- against their better judgment or their own moral code- stray. But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people’s infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or a wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don’t sense the danger as it’s happening, because what’s wrong with friendship? Why can’t we have friends of the opposite sex- or of the same sex, for that matter- even if we are married?  The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony- so long as the “ walls and windows” of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass’s theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world- that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage. What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself- your deepest yearnings and frustrations- and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where they’re really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In doing so, you have now created a problem:  you have just built a wall between you and your spouse where they’re really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing. So by the time your new friend comes into your office one day in tears over some piece of bad news, and you wrap your arms around each other ( only meaning to be comforting!), and then your lips brush and you realize in a dizzying rush that you love  this person- that you have always  loved this person!- it’s too late. Because now the fuse has been lit. And now you really do run the risk of someday (probably very soon) standing amid the wreckage of your life, facing a betrayed and shattered spouse (whom you still care about immensely, by the way), trying to explain through your ragged sobs how you never meant to hurt anybody, and how you  never saw it coming.  And it’s true. You didn’t see it coming. But you did build it, and you could have stopped it if you’d acted faster. The moment you found yourself sharing secrets with a new friend that really ought to belong to your spouse, there was, according to Dr. Glass, a much smarter and more honest path to be taken. Her suggestion would be that you come home and tell your husband or wife about it. The script goes along these lines: “I have something worrying to share with you. I went out to lunch twice this week with Shirley, and I was struck by the fact that our conversation quickly became intimate. I found myself sharing things with her that I used to only share with you. This is the way you and I used to talk at the beginning of our relationship- and I love that so much- but I fear we’ve lost that. I miss that level of intimacy with you. Do you think there’s anything you and I might do to rekindle our connection?” 

It’s always possible that the two of you will be unable to figure things out, but at least you’ll know later on that you made a heartfelt effort to keep the walls and the windows of your marriage secured, and that knowledge can be comforting.

In reading Dr. Glass’s research on infidelity and the notion that you are somewhat in control of what happens within and around your relationships was something I hadn’t heard before. 

The Rutgers survey says that the younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later. In fact, you are astonishingly  more likely to get divorced if you marry young. You are, for example, two to three times more likely to get divorced if you marry in your teens or early 20’s than if you wait until your 30’s or 40’s. 

 

According to the Rutgers study, other factors of marital resilience include:

• Education- The better educated you are, statistically speaking, the better off your marriage will be. Women with college educations and careers who marry relatively late in life are the most likely female candidates to stay married.
•  Children–  the statistics show that couples with young children at home report more “disenchantment” within their marriage than couples with grown children, or couples who have no children at all.
•  Cohabitation–  people who live together before marriage have a slightly higher divorce rate than those who wait until marriage to cohabit.
•  Heterogamy– the less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce. Opposites do attract, but they don’t always endure. 
•  social integration– The more tightly woven a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be. 
•  Religiousness
•  gender fairness – Marriages based on a traditional, restrictive sense about a woman’s place in the home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female and thankless household chores.

 

Short of infidelity and flat-out abuse, nothing corrodes relationships faster than poverty, bankruptcy, and debt. Extreme poverty breeds extreme tension; this should surprise nobody. divorce rates all over america are highest among uneducated and financially insecure adults.

 

We have to start with the cold, ugly fact that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. I did not invent this fact, and I don’t like saying it, but it’s a sad truth, backed up I study after study. By contrast, marriage as an institution has always been terrifically beneficial for men. If you are a man, say the actuarial charts, the smartest decision you can possibly make for yourself- assuming that you would like to lead a long, happy, healthy, prosperous existence- is to get married. Married men perform dazzlingly better in life than single men. Married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men and saw other careers above single men; married men are far less likely to die of violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men. 

 

Dishearteningly, the reverse is not true. Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married woman in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single woman (you take a 7% pay cut, on average, just forgetting hitched); married woman do not thrive in their careers to the extent single woman do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die of violent death than single women- usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman’s life is her own man. All this adds up to what puzzled sociologists call the “Marriage  Benefit Imbalance”- a tiny name for an almost frequently doleful conclusion: that women generally lose in the exchange of marriage vows, while men win big. Now before we all lie down under our desks and weep, I must assure everyone that the situation is getting better. As the years go by and more women become autonomous, the marriage benefit imbalance diminishes, and there are some factors that can narrow this in equity considerably. The more education a married woman has, the more money she earns, the later in life she marries, the fewer children she bears, and the more help her husband offers with household chores, the better her quality of life and marriage will be. 

 

The statistics of the last United States Census tells the real story: In 2000, they were about 5.3 million stay-at-home mothers in America, and only about 140,000 stay-at-home dads. That translates into a stay-at-home dad rate of only about 2.6% of all stay at home parents. As of this writing, that survey is already a decade old, so let’s hope the ratio is changing. 

I do believe that one should at least try to understand one’s mother’s marriage before embarking on a marriage of one’s own. Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family’s history. 

Mom came of age in the 1950s, after all, during an era when a popular family advice doctor named Paul Landes preached that every single adult in America should be married,” except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective”. 

An awful lot of my advantages as a child were built on the ashes of my Mother’s personal sacrifice. The fact remains that while our family as a whole profited immensely for my mother’s quitting her career, her life as an individual did not necessarily benefit so immensely.  And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two parent household with a mother in the kitchen. if I- as a beneficiary of that exact formula- will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome woman burden on women? uSch a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives- instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble”- be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do it. 

 

The poet Jack Gilbert wrote that marriage is what happens “between the memorable”.  He said that we often look back on our marriage years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are “ the vacations, and emergencies”- the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those 2,000 indistinguishable conversations, chatted over 2,000 indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody- so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Something my sister and I have termed “ Wifeless Marriage”- which is to say that nobody in our household will play (or play exclusively) the traditional role of the wife. The more thankless chores that have always fallen on women’s shoulders will be balanced out more evenly.

In Florence during the 1600s, for instance, a monk (ergo celibate) named Brother Cherubino was entrusted with the extraordinary task of writing a handbook for Christian husbands and wives that would clarify rules for what was considered acceptable sexual intercourse within Christian marriage and what was not. “ Sexual Activity”,  Brother Cherubino instructed,” should not involve the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, or any other part of the body that is in no way necessary for procreation”. The wife could look at her husband’s private parts, but only if he was sick, and not because it was exciting, and “never allow yourself, women, to be seen in the nude by your husband”.  And while it was permissible for Christians to bathe every now and again, it was, of course, terribly wicked to try to make yourself smell good in order to be sexually attractive to your spouse. Also, you must never kiss your spouse using your tongue. Not  anywhere! “ The devil knows how to do so much between husband and wife”,  Brother Cherubino lamented “he makes them touch and kiss not only the honest parts but the dishonest ones as well”. Even just to think about it, I am overwhelmed by horror, fright and bewilderment….” 

 

Of course, as far as the church was concerned, the most horrible, frightening, and bewildrering thing of all was that the matrimonial bed was so private and therefore so ultimately uncontrollable. Not even the most vigilant of Florentine monks could stop the explorations of two private tongues in one private bedroom in the middle of the night. Nor could any one monk control what all those tongues were talking about once love making was over- and this was perhaps the most threatening reality of all. Even in that most repressive age, once the doors were closed and the people could make their own choices, each couple defined its own terms of intimate expression. In the end, the couples tend to win. Once the authorities have failed at eliminating marriage, and once they have failed at controlling marriage, they give up and embrace the matrimonial tradition completely. but then comes an even more curious stage: like clockwork, the powers that be will now try to co-op the nation of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place, is what Conservative Christian leadership has been doing in the western world for several centuries. acting as though they personally created the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values. 

To get this book, click HERE!

 

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