Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  But I loved the high of infatuation in my youth, and so I made a habit of it. By "habit," I mean exactly the same thing that any heroin addict means when he speaks of his habit: a mild word for an unmanageable compulsion. I sought passion everywhere. I freebased it. I became the kind of girl about whom Grace Paley was surely thinking when she described a character who always needed a man in her life, even when it might have appeared that she already had one. Falling in love at first sight became a particular specialty of mine in my late teens and early twenties; I could do it upwards of four times a year. There were occasions when I made myself so sick over romance that I lost whole chunks of my life to it. I would vanish into abandon at the beginning of the encounter but soon enough find myself sobbing and barfing at the end of it. Along the way I would lose so much sleep and so much sanity that parts of the whole process start to look, in retrospect, like an alcoholic blackout. Except without the alcohol.

  Should such a young lady have gotten married at the age of twenty-five? Wisdom and Prudence might have suggested not. But I did not invite Wisdom or Prudence to my wedding. (In my defense, nor were they guests of the groom.) I was a careless girl back then, in every possible way. I once read a newspaper article about a man who caused thousands of acres of forest to burn down because he drove all day through a national park with his muffler dragging, causing explosive sparks to leap into the dry underbrush and set a new small fire every few hundred feet. Other motorists along the way kept honking and waving and trying to alert the driver's attention to the damage he was causing, but the guy was happily listening to his radio and didn't notice the catastrophe he had set in motion behind him.

  That was me in my youth.

  Only when I reached my early thirties, only once my ex-husband and I had wrecked our marriage for good, only once my life had been utterly disrupted (as well as the lives of a few very nice men, a few not-so-nice men, and a handful of innocent bystanders) did I finally stop the car. I got out and looked around at the charred landscape, blinked a bit, and asked, "You don't mean to suggest that all this mess might have something to do with me?"

  Then came the depression.

  The Quaker teacher Parker Palmer once said of his own life that depression was a friend sent to save him from the exaggerated elevations of false euphoria that he'd been manufacturing forever. Depression pushed him back down to earth, Palmer said, back down to a level where it might finally be safe for him to walk and stand in reality. I, too, needed to be hauled down to the real after years spent artificially hoisting myself aloft with one thoughtless passion after another. I've come to see my season of depression, too, as having been essential--if also grim and sorrowful.

  I used that time alone to study myself, to truthfully answer painful questions, and--with the help of a patient therapist--to work out the origins of my most destructive behaviors. I traveled (and veered away from handsome Spanish men in bus terminals). I diligently pursued healthier forms of joy. I spent a lot of time alone. I'd never been alone before, but I mapped my way through it. I learned how to pray, atoning as best I could for the burned wasteland behind me. Most of all, though, I practiced the novel art of self-comfort, resisting all fleeting romantic and sexual temptations with this newly adult question: "Will this choice be beneficial to anybody in the long term?" In short: I grew up.

  Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds become mature enough for sex. The two events can be separated by many, many years, though I do wonder if perhaps our emotional maturity comes to us only through the experiences and lessons of our youthful romantic failures. To ask a twenty-year-old girl to somehow automatically know things about life that most forty-year-old women needed decades to understand is expecting an awful lot of wisdom from a very young person. Maybe we must all go through the anguish and errors of a first puberty, in other words, before any of us can ascend into the second one?

  Anyhow, long into my experiment with solitude and self-accountability, I met Felipe. He was kind and loyal and attentive, and we took it slow. This was not teen love. Nor was it puppy love or last-day-of-summer-camp love. On the surface, I will admit, our love story did seem awfully romantic as it was unfolding. For pity's sake, we met on the tropical island of Bali, under the swaying palm trees, etc., etc. One could hardly summon a more idyllic setting than this. At the time, I remember describing this whole dreamy scene in an e-mail that I sent to my older sister back in the suburbs of Philadelphia. In retrospect, this was probably unfair of me. Catherine--at home with two little kids and facing down a massive house renovation--replied only, "Yeah, I was planning to go to a tropical island this weekend with my Brazilian lover, too . . . but then there was all that traffic."

  So, yes, my love affair with Felipe had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here's how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man's chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homunculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet Felipe for who he was. In each other's eyes, we may very well have seemed beautiful and perfect and heroic beyond measure, but I never lost sight of our actual realities: I was a loving but haggard divorced lady who needed to carefully manage her tendency toward melodramatic romance and unreasonable expectation; Felipe was an affectionate and balding divorced guy who needed to carefully manage his drinking and his deep-seated fear of betrayal. We were two nice enough people, bearing the wounds of some very average massive personal disappointments, and we were looking for something that might simply be possible in each other--a certain kindness, a certain attentiveness, a certain shared yearning to trust and be trusted.

  To this day, I refuse to burden Felipe with the tremendous responsibility of somehow completing me. By this point in my life I have figured out that he cannot complete me, even if he wanted to. I've faced enough of my own incompletions to recognize that they belong solely to me. Having learned this essential truth, I can actually tell now where I end and where somebody else begins. That may sound like an embarrassingly simple trick, but I do need to make clear that it took me over three and a half decades to get to this point--to learn the limitations of sane human intimacy, as nicely defined by C. S. Lewis, when he wrote of his wife, "We both knew this: I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine."

  One plus one, in other words, is sometimes supposed to equal two.

  But how do I know for certain that I will never again become infatuated with anybody else? How trustworthy is my heart? How solid is Felipe's loyalty to me? How do I know without doubt that outside desires won't tempt us apart?

  These were the questions that I started asking myself as soon as I realized that Felipe and I were--as my sister calls us--"lifers." To be honest, I was less worried about his loyalties than I was about my own. Felipe has a far simpler history in love than I do. He is a hopeless monogamist who chooses somebody and then relaxes easily into fidelity, and that's pretty much it. He's faithful in every regard. Once he has a favorite restaurant, he's happy to eat there every night, never craving variety. If he enjoys a movie, he'll contentedly watch it hundreds of times. If he likes an item of clothing, you will see him wearing it for years. The first time I ever bought him a pair of shoes, he said quite sweetly, "Oh, that's lovely of you, darling--but I already have a pair of shoes."

  Felipe's first marriage didn't end with infidelity (he already had a pair of shoes, if you catch my point). Instead, the relationship was buried under an avalanche of circumstantial misfortunes that put too much pressure on the family and finally snapped the bonds. This was a pity, because Felipe, I honestly believe, is meant to mate for life. He's loyal on a cellular level. I mean that, perhaps, quite literally. There's a theor
y within evolutionary scholarship these days suggesting that there are two sorts of men in this world: those who are meant to father children, and those who are meant to raise children. The former are promiscuous; the latter are constant.

  This is the famous "Dads or Cads" theory. In evolutionary circles this is not considered a moral judgment call, but rather something that can actually be broken down to the level of DNA. Apparently, there is this critical little chemical variation in the male of the species called the "vasopressin receptor gene." Men who have the vasopressin receptor gene tend to be trustworthy and reliable sexual partners, sticking with one spouse for decades, raising children and running stable households. (Let's call such guys "Harry Trumans.") Men who lack the vasopressin receptor gene, on the other hand, are prone to dalliance and disloyalty, always needing to seek sexual variety elsewhere. (Let's call such men "John F. Kennedys.")

  The joke among female evolutionary biologists is that there's only one part of a man's anatomy that any potential mate should worry about measuring, and that is the length of his vasopressin receptor gene. The scantily-vasopression-receptor-gened John F. Kennedys of this world wander far and wide, spreading their seed across the earth, keeping the human DNA code mixed up and jumbled--which is good for the species, if not necessarily good for the women who are loved and then often abandoned. The long-gened Harry Trumans, in the end, often find themselves raising the kids of the John F. Kennedys.

  Felipe is a Harry Truman, and by the time I met him, I was so finished with JFKs, so exhausted by their charms and heart-splintering whims, that all I wanted was this reassuring bundle of steadfastness. But I don't take Felipe's decency for granted either, nor do I blithely relax with regard to my own fidelity. History teaches us that just about anybody is capable of just about anything when it comes to the realm of love and desire. Circumstances arise in all of our lives that challenge even our most stubborn loyalties. Maybe this is what we fear most when we enter into marriage--that "circumstances," in the form of some uncontrollable outside passion, will someday break the bond.

  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. How many times have we heard someone say, "I wasn't looking for love outside my marriage, but it just happened"? Put in such terms, adultery starts to sound like a car accident, like a patch of black ice hidden on a treacherous curve, waiting for an unsuspecting motorist.

  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 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 there 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 so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there 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 have belonged 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 Mark, and I was struck by the fact that our conversation quickly became intimate. I found myself sharing things with him that I used to share only with you. This is the way you and I used to talk at the beginning of our relationship--and I loved 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?"

  The answer, truthfully, might be: "No."

  There might be nothing you can do to rekindle that connection. I have a friend who brought her husband pretty much this exact conversation, to which he replied, "I don't really give a shit who you spend your time with." And there's a marriage that, not surprisingly, ended soon after. (And needed to, I would argue.) But if your spouse is at all responsive, he or she might hear the longing behind your admission, and will hopefully react to it, maybe even countering with an expression of his or her own longing.

  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. Also, you may avoid cheating on your spouse, even if you may not ultimately avoid divorcing your spouse--and that alone can be a good thing, for many reasons. As an old lawyer friend of mine once observed, "No divorce in human history has ever been rendered more simple, more compassionate, more quick or less expensive by somebody's episode of adultery."

  In any case, reading Dr. Glass's research on infidelity filled me with a sense of hope that felt almost euphoric. Her ideas about marital fidelity are not especially complex, but it's just that I'd never learned this stuff before. I'm not sure I ever understood the almost embarrassingly remedial notion that you are somewhat in control of what happens within and around your relationships. I shame myself by admitting this, but it's true. I once believed that desire was as unmanageable as a tornado; all you could do was hope it didn't suck up your house and explode the thing in midair. As for those couples whose relationships lasted decades? They must have been very lucky, I figured, that the tornado never hit them. (It never occurred to me that they might have actually constructed storm cellars together underneath their ho
mes, where they could retreat whenever the winds picked up.)

  Though the human heart may indeed be shot through with bottomless desire, and while the world may well be full of alluring creatures and other delicious options, it seems one truly can make clear-eyed choices that limit and manage the risk of infatuation. And if you're worried about future "trouble" in your marriage, it's good to understand that trouble is not necessarily something that always "just happens"; trouble is often cultured unthinkingly in careless little petri dishes we have left scattered all over town.

  Does all this sound excruciatingly obvious to everybody else? Because it was not excruciatingly obvious to me. This is information I really could've used over a decade ago when I was getting married for the first time. I didn't know any of this stuff. And I am appalled sometimes to realize that I stepped into matrimony without this piece of useful data, or without very many pieces of useful data at all. Looking back on my first wedding now, I'm reminded of what so many of my friends say about the day they brought their first babies home from the hospital. There is this moment, my friends report, when the nurse hands over the infant, and the new mother realizes with horror, "Oh my God--they're going to send this thing home with me? I have no idea what I'm doing!" But of course hospitals give mothers their babies and send them on home, because there is an assumption that motherhood is somehow instinctive, that you will naturally know how to care for your own child--that love will teach you how--even if you have zero experience or training for this towering undertaking.

  I've come to believe that we all too often make the same assumption about marriage. We believe that if two people really love each other, then intimacy will somehow be intuitive to them, and their marriage will run forever on the mere power of affection. Because all you need is love! Or so I believed in my youth. You certainly don't need strategies or assistance or tools or perspective. And so it came to pass that my first husband and I just went ahead and got married from a place of great ignorance and great immaturity and great unpreparedness simply because we felt like getting married. We sealed our vows without a single clue whatsoever about how to keep our union alive and safe.