Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  On this day, though, the young monk sat down right beside me. He was so close that I could see the faint hairs on his thin, pale-brown arms. Our workstations were so near to each other that I could also see his computer screen quite clearly. After a spell, I glanced over to get a sense of what he was working on, and realized that the boy was reading a love letter. Actually, he was reading a love e-mail, which I quickly gleaned was from somebody named Carla, who was clearly not Laotian and who wrote in comfortable, colloquial English. So Carla was American, then. Or maybe British. Or Australian. One sentence on the boy's computer screen popped out at me: "I still long for you as my lover."

  Which snapped me from my reverie. Dear Lord, what was I doing reading somebody's private correspondence? And over his shoulder, no less? I pulled my eyes away, ashamed of myself. This was none of my business. I returned my attention to Delaware Valley real estate listings. Though naturally I found it a tad difficult to focus on my own tasks anymore, because, come on: Who the hell was Carla?

  How had a young Western woman and a teenage Laotian monk met in the first place? How old was she? And when she wrote, "I still long for you as my lover," had she meant, "I want you as my lover?"--or had this relationship been consummated, and she was now cherishing a memory of shared physical passion? If Carla and the monk had consummated their love affair--well, how? When? Perhaps Carla had been on vacation in Luang Prabang, and maybe she'd struck up a conversation somehow with this boy, despite the fact that females should not even gaze at the novices? Had he sung out "Hello, Mrs. Lady!" to her, and maybe things had tumbled toward a sexual encounter from there? What would become of them now? Was this boy going to give up his vows and move to Australia now? (Or Britain, or Canada, or Memphis?) Would Carla relocate to Laos? Would they ever see each other again? Would he be defrocked if they were caught? (Do you even call it "defrocked" in Buddhism?) Was this love affair going to ruin his life? Or hers? Or both?

  The boy stared at his computer in rapt silence, studying his love letter with such concentration that he had no awareness whatsoever of me sitting right there beside him, worrying silently about his future. And I was worried about him--worried that he was in way over his head here, and that this chain of action could only lead to heartache.

  Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities. So Carla had the hots for a teenage monk--what of it? How could I judge her for this? Over the course of my own life, hadn't I also fallen in love with many inappropriate men? And weren't the beautiful young "spiritual" ones the most alluring of all?

  The monk did not type out a response to Carla--or at least not that afternoon. He read the letter a few more times, as carefully as though he were studying a religious text. Then he sat for a long while in silence, hands resting lightly on his lap, eyes closed as though in meditation. Finally the boy took action: He printed out the e-mail. He read Carla's words once more, this time on paper. He folded the note with tenderness, as though he were folding an origami crane, and tucked it away somewhere inside his orange robes. Then this beautiful almost-child of a young man disconnected from the Internet and walked out of the cafe into the searing heat of the ancient river town.

  I stood up after a moment and followed him outside, unnoticed. I watched as he walked up the street, moving slowly in the direction of the central temple on the hill, looking neither to the left nor the right. Soon enough a group of young monks came walking by, gradually overtaking him, and Carla's monk quietly joined their ranks, disappearing into the crowd of slim young novices like an orange fish vanishing into a school of its duplicate brothers. I immediately lost track of him there in this throng of boys who all looked exactly the same. But clearly these boys were not all exactly the same. Only one of those young Laotian monks, for instance, had a love letter from a woman named Carla folded and hidden somewhere within his robes. And as crazy as it seemed, and as dangerous a game as he was playing here, I could not help but feel a little excited for the kid.

  Whatever the outcome, something was happening to him.

  The Buddha taught that all human suffering is rooted in desire. Don't we all know this to be true? Any of us who have ever desired something and then didn't get it (or, worse, got it and subsequently lost it) know full well the suffering of which the Buddha spoke. Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody--really want him--it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause you a lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain the object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such primal urgency, you no longer completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own yearnings.

  So you can see why the Buddha, who taught serene detachment as a path to wisdom, might not have approved of this young monk furtively carrying around love letters from somebody named Carla. You can see how Lord Buddha might have regarded this tryst as a bit of distraction. Certainly no relationship rooted in secrecy and lust would have impressed him. But then the Buddha was not a big fan of sexual or romantic intimacy anyhow. Remember, before he became the Perfected One, he had abandoned a wife and child of his own in order to set forth unencumbered on a spiritual journey. Much like the early Christian fathers, the Buddha taught that only the celibate and the solitary can find enlightenment. Therefore, traditional Buddhism has always been somewhat suspicious of marriage. The Buddhist path is a journey of nonattachment, and marriage is an estate that brings an intrinsic sense of attachment to spouse, children, and home. The journey to enlightenment begins by walking away from all that.

  There does exist a role for married people in traditional Buddhist culture, but it's more of a supporting role than anything else. The Buddha referred to married people as "householders." He even gave clear instructions as to how one should be a good householder: Be nice to your spouse, be honest, be faithful, give alms to the poor, buy some insurance against fire and flood . . .

  I'm dead serious: The Buddha literally advised married couples to buy property insurance.

  Not quite as exciting a path as parting the veil of illusion and standing on the shimmering threshold of untarnished perfection, now is it? But as far as the Buddha was concerned, enlightenment was simply not available to householders. In this way, again, he resembled the early Christian fathers, who believed that spousal attachment was nothing but an obstacle to heaven--which does lead one to start pondering exactly what these enlightened beings had against couplehood anyhow. Why all the hostility toward romantic and sexual union, or even toward steadfast marriage? Why all the resistance to love? Or perhaps it wasn't love that was the problem; Jesus and the Buddha were the greatest teachers of love and compassion the world has ever seen. Perhaps it was the attendant danger of desire that caused these masters to worry for people's souls and sanity and equilibrium.

  The problem is that we're all full of desire; it is the very hallmark of our emotional existence, and it can lead to our downfall--and to the downfall of others. In the most famous treatise on desire ever written, The Symposium, Plato describes a famous dinner party during which the playwright Aristophanes lays out the mythical story of why we humans have such deep longings for union with each other, and why our acts of union can sometimes be so unsatisfying and even destructive.

  Once upon a time, Aristophanes relates, there were gods in the heavens and humans down on earth. But we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms--a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. We came in three different possible gender or sexual variations: male/female meldings, male/male meldings, and femal
e/female meldings, depending on what suited each creature the best. Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy. Thus, all of us double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented creatures moved across the earth much the same way that the planets travel through the heavens--dreamily, orderly, smoothly. We lacked for nothing; we had no unmet needs; we wanted nobody. There was no strife and no chaos. We were whole.

  But in our wholeness, we became overly proud. In our pride, we neglected to worship the gods. The mighty Zeus punished us for our neglect by cutting all the double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented humans in half, thereby creating a world of cruelly severed one-headed, two-armed, two-legged miserable creatures. In this moment of mass amputation, Zeus inflicted on mankind that most painful of human conditions: the dull and constant sense that we are not quite whole. For the rest of time, humans would be born sensing that there was some missing part--a lost half, which we love almost more than we love ourselves--and that this missing part was out there someplace, spinning through the universe in the form of another person. We would also be born believing that if only we searched relentlessly enough, we might someday find that vanished half, that other soul. Through union with the other, we would recomplete our original form, never to experience loneliness again.

  This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one.

  But Aristophanes warned that this dream of completion-through-love is impossible. We are too broken as a species to ever entirely mend through simple union. The original cleaved halves of the severed eight-limbed humans were far too scattered for any of us to ever find our missing halves again. Sexual union can make a person feel completed and sated for a while (Aristophanes surmised that Zeus had given humans the gift of orgasm out of pity, specifically so that we could feel temporarily melded again, and would not die of depression and despair), but eventually, one way or another, we will all be left alone with ourselves in the end. So the loneliness continues, which causes us to mate with the wrong people over and over again, seeking perfected union. We may even believe at times that we have found our other half, but it's more likely that all we've found is somebody else who is searching for his other half--somebody who is equally desperate to believe that he has found that completion in us.

  This is how infatuation begins. And infatuation is the most perilous aspect of human desire. Infatuation leads to what psychologists call "intrusive thinking"--that famously distracted state in which you cannot concentrate on anything other than the object of your obsession. Once infatuation strikes, all else--jobs, relationships, responsibilities, food, sleep, work--falls by the wayside as you nurse fantasies about your dearest one that quickly become repetitive, invasive, and all-consuming. Infatuation alters your brain chemistry, as though you were dousing yourself with opiates and stimulants. The brain scans and mood swings of an infatuated lover, scientists have recently discovered, look remarkably similar to the brain scans and mood swings of a cocaine addict--and not surprisingly, as it turns out, because infatuation is an addiction, with measurable chemical effects on the brain. As the anthropologist and infatuation expert Dr. Helen Fisher has explained, infatuated lovers, just like any junkie, "will go to unhealthy, humiliating, and even physically dangerous lengths to procure their narcotic."

  Nowhere is that drug stronger than at the very beginning of a passionate relationship. Fisher has noted that an awful lot of babies are conceived during the first six months of a love story, a fact that I find really noteworthy. Hypnotic obsession can lead to a sense of euphoric abandon, and euphoric abandon is the very best way to find yourself accidentally pregnant. Some anthropologists argue, in fact, that the human species needs infatuation as a reproductive tool in order to keep us reckless enough to risk the hazards of pregnancy so that we can constantly replenish our ranks.

  Fisher's research has also shown that people are far more susceptible to infatuation when they are going through delicate or vulnerable times in their lives. The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely fall in love. This makes infatuation start to sound like a dormant virus, lying in wait, ever ready to attack our weakened emotional immune systems. College students, for instance--away from home for the first time, uncertain, lacking familiar support networks--are notoriously susceptible to infatuation. And we all know that travelers in foreign lands often fall wildly in love, overnight it seems, with total strangers. In the flux and thrill of travel, our protective mechanisms break down quickly. This is marvelous in one way (for the rest of my life I will always feel a shiver of pleasure whenever I remember kissing that guy outside the bus terminal in Madrid), but it is wise in such circumstances to heed the advice of the venerable North American philosopher Pamela Anderson: "Never get married on vacation."

  Anybody going through a difficult time emotionally--due to the death of a family member, perhaps, or the loss of a job--is also susceptible to unstable love. The sick and the wounded and the frightened are famously vulnerable to sudden love, too--which helps explain why so many battle-torn soldiers marry their nurses. Spouses with relationships in crisis are also prime candidates for infatuation with a new lover, as I can personally attest from the mad commotion that surrounded the end of my own first marriage--when I had the good, solid judgment to go out in the world and fall quite insanely in love with another man at the very same moment as I was leaving my husband. My great unhappiness and my shredded sense of self made me ripe for the plucking of infatuation, and boy, did I get plucked. In my situation (and from what I know now, it is a tediously common textbook example), my new love interest seemed to have a giant EXIT sign hanging over his head--and I dived right through that exit, using the love affair as an excuse to escape my collapsing marriage, then claiming with an almost hysterical certainty that this person was everything I truly needed in life.

  Shocking how that didn't work out.

  The problem with infatuation, of course, is that it's a mirage, a trick of the eye--indeed, a trick of the endocrine system. Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job. When you become infatuated with somebody, you're not really looking at that person; you're just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual stranger. We tend, in such a state, to decide all sorts of spectacular things about our lovers that may or may not be true. We perceive something almost divine in our beloved, even if our friends and family might not get it. One man's Venus is another man's bimbo, after all, and somebody else might easily consider your personal Adonis to be a flat-out boring little loser.

  Of course all lovers do--and should--see their partners through generous eyes. It's natural, even appropriate, to exaggerate somewhat our partners' virtues. Carl Jung suggested that the first six months of most love stories is a period of pure projection for just about anyone. But infatuation is projection run off the rails. An infatuation-based affair is a sanity-free zone, where misconception has no limits and where perspective finds no foothold. Freud defined infatuation pithily as "the overvaluation of the object," and Goethe put it even better: "When two people are really happy about one another, one can generally assume they are mistaken." (By the way, poor Goethe! Not even he was immune to infatuation, not for all his wisdom or experience. That staunch old German, at the age of seventy-one, fell passionately in love with the utterly inappropriate Ulrike, a nineteen-year-old beauty who turned down his heated marriage proposals, leaving the aging genius so bereft that he wrote a requiem to his own life, concluding with the lines "I have lost the whole world, I have lost myself.")

  Any actual relating is impossible during such a state of pitched fever. 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
("to 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 a sane state. For instance, we might find ourselves sitting down one day to write a passionate e-mail to a sixteen-year-old monk in Laos--or whatever. 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."

  I call it "my twenties."

  Listen, I want to make it clear here that I am not intrinsically against passion. Mercy, no! The single most exhilarating sensations I have ever experienced in my life happened when I was consumed by romantic obsession. That kind of love makes you feel superheroic, mythical, beyond human, immortal. You radiate life; you need no sleep; your beloved fills your lungs like oxygen. As painfully as those experiences may have turned out in the end (and they always did end in pain for me), I would hate to see someone go through an entire lifetime never knowing what it feels like to morph euphorically into another person's being. So when I say that I'm sort of excited for the monk and Carla, that's what I'm talking about. I'm glad they have the opportunity to taste that narcotic bliss. But I'm also really, really glad that it's not me this time.

  Because here is something I know for certain about myself, as I near the age of forty. I can no longer do infatuation. It kills me. In the end, it always puts me through the wood chipper. While I know there must be some couples out there whose love stories began with a bonfire of obsession and then mellowed safely over the years into the embers of a long, healthy relationship, I myself never learned that trick. For me, infatuation has only ever done one thing: It destroys, and generally pretty fast.