Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Within a handful of days, we were married.

  We got married in our new home--in that odd, old church--on a cold Sunday afternoon in February. It's very convenient, it turns out, to own a church when one has to get married.

  The marriage license cost us twenty-eight dollars and a photocopy of one utility bill. The guests were: my parents (married forty years); my Uncle Terry and Aunt Deborah (married twenty years); my sister and her husband (married fifteen years); my friend Jim Smith (divorced for twenty-five years); and Toby the family dog (never married, bi-curious). We all wished that Felipe's children (unmarried) could have joined us, too, but the wedding happened on such short notice that there was no way to get them over in time from Australia. We had to make do with a few excited phone calls, but could not risk a delay. We needed to seal this deal immediately to protect Felipe's place on American soil with an inviolable legal bond.

  In the end, we had decided that we wanted a few witnesses at our wedding after all. My friend Brian was right: Marriage is not an act of private prayer. Instead, it is both a public and a private concern, with real-world consequences. While the intimate terms of our relationship would always belong solely to Felipe and me, it was important to remember that a small share of our marriage would always belong to our families as well--to all those people who would be most seriously affected by our success or our failure. They needed to be present on that day, then, in order to emphasize this point. I also had to admit that another small share of our vows, like it or not, would always belong to the State. That's what made this a legal wedding in the first place after all.

  But the smallest and most curiously shaped share of our vows belonged to history--at whose impressively large feet we all must kneel eventually. Wherever you have landed in history determines to a large extent what your marriage vows will look like and sound like. Since Felipe and I happened to have landed right there, in that little Garden State mill town, in the year 2007, we decided not to write our own idiosyncratic personal promises (we had done that back in Knoxville anyhow), but to acknowledge our place in history by repeating the basic, secular vows of the State of New Jersey. It just felt like an appropriate nod to reality.

  Of course, my niece and nephew attended the wedding, too. Nick, the theatrical genius, was on hand to read a commemorative poem. And Mimi? She had cornered me a week earlier and asked, "Is this going to be a real wedding or not?"

  "That all depends," I'd said. "What do you think constitutes a real wedding?"

  "A real wedding means there will be a flower girl," Mimi replied. "And the flower girl will be wearing a pink dress. And the flower girl will be carrying flowers. Not a bouquet of flowers, but a basket of rose petals. And not pink rose petals, either, but yellow rose petals. And the flower girl will walk in front of the bride, and she will throw the yellow rose petals on the ground. Will you be having anything like that?"

  "I'm not sure," I said. "I guess it just depends on whether we can find a girl somewhere who might be capable of doing that job. Can you think of anyone?"

  "I suppose I could do it," she replied slowly, looking away with a terrific show of false indifference. "I mean, if you can't find anyone else . . ."

  So it turned out that we did have a real wedding, even by Mimi's exacting standards. Aside from our extremely decked-out flower girl, though, it was a pretty casual affair. I wore my favorite red sweater. The groom wore his blue shirt (the clean one). Jim Smith played his guitar, and my Aunt Deborah--a trained opera singer--sang "La Vie en Rose" just for Felipe's benefit. Nobody seemed to mind that the house was still unpacked and largely unfurnished. The only room that was fully usable thus far was the kitchen, and that was only so that Felipe could prepare a wedding lunch for everyone. He'd been cooking for two days, and we had to remind him to take off his apron when it came time to actually get married. ("A very good sign," my mother noted.)

  Our wedding vows were administered by a nice man named Harry Furstenberger, the mayor of this small New Jersey township. When Mayor Harry first walked in the door, my father asked him directly, "Are you a Democrat or a Republican?" because he knew that this would matter to me.

  "I'm a Republican," said Mayor Harry.

  There followed a moment of tense silence. Then my sister whispered, "Actually, Liz, for this kind of thing, you sort of want a Republican. Just to make sure the marriage really sticks with Homeland Security, you know?"

  So we proceeded.

  You all know the gist of the standard American wedding vows, so I need not repeat them here. Suffice it to say, we repeated them there. Without irony or hesitation, we exchanged our vows in the presence of my family, in the presence of our friendly Republican mayor, in the presence of an actual flower girl, and in the presence of Toby the dog. In fact, Toby--sensing an important moment here--curled up on the floor right between Felipe and me just as we were sealing these promises. We had to lean over the dog in order to kiss each other. This felt auspicious; in medieval wedding portraits, you will often see the image of a dog painted between the figures of a newly wed couple--the ultimate symbol of fidelity.

  By the end of it all--and it really doesn't take very much time, considering the magnitude of the event--Felipe and I were finally legally married. Then we all sat down for a long lunch together--the mayor and my friend Jim and my family and the kids and my new husband. I did not have any way of knowing with certainty on that afternoon what peace and contentment were awaiting me in this marriage (reader: I know it now), but I did feel calm and grateful all the same. It was a lovely day. There was much wine and there were many toasts. The balloons that Nick and Mimi had brought with them drifted slowly up to the dusty old church ceiling and bobbed there above us all. People might have lingered even longer, but by dusk it had begun to sleet, so our guests gathered together their coats and belongings, eager to get on the road while the getting was still good.

  Soon enough, everyone was gone.

  And Felipe and I were left alone together at last, to clean up the lunch dishes and begin unpacking our home.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is a work of nonfiction. I have re-created all conversations and incidents to the best of my ability, but sometimes--for the sake of narrative coherence--I have edited down events or discussions that may have taken place over several days into one passage. Moreover, I have changed some--but not all--of the names of the characters in this story in order to protect the privacy of certain people who may not have intended, when their paths accidentally crossed mine, to show up later in a book. I thank Chris Langford for helping me track down appropriate aliases for these good people.

  I am not a professional academic, nor a sociologist, nor a psychologist, nor an expert on marriage. I have done my best in this book to discuss the history of matrimony as accurately as possible, but in order to do so, I had to rely a great deal on the work of scholars and writers who have dedicated their entire professional lives to this topic. I won't list a full bibliography here, but I must offer special gratitude to a few specific authors:

  The work of the historian Stephanie Coontz has been a shining beacon for me over these last three years of study, and I cannot recommend highly enough her fascinating and extremely readable book Marriage: A History. I also owe an enormous debt to Nancy Cott, Eileen Powers, William Jordan, Erika Uitz, Rudolph M. Bell, Deborah Luepnitz, Zygmunt Bauman, Leonard Shlain, Helen Fisher, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman, Evan Wolfson, Shirley Glass, Andrew J. Cherkin, Ferdinand Mount, Anne Fadiman (for her extraordinary writing on the Hmong), Allan Bloom (for his contemplations on the Greek-Hebrew philosophical divide), the many authors of the Rutgers University study on marriage, and--most delightfully and unexpectedly of all--Honore de Balzac.

  Aside from these authors, the single most influential person in the shaping of this book has been my friend Anne Connell, who copy-edited, fact-checked, and corrected this manuscript to within an inch of its life, using her bionic eyes, her magical golden pencil, and her unparallel
ed expertise with "the Web nets." Nobody--and I mean nobody--rivals the Scrutatrix for such editorial thoroughness. I have Anne to thank for the fact that this book is divided into chapters, that the word "actually" does not appear four times in every paragraph, and that every frog within these pages has been correctly identified as an amphibian and not a reptile.

  I thank my sister Catherine Gilbert Murdock, who is not only a gifted writer of young adult fiction (her wonderful book Dairy Queen is a must-read for any thinking girl between the ages of ten and sixteen), but who is also my dearly beloved friend and the greatest intellectual role model of my life. She, too, read this book with time-consuming care, saving me from many errors of thought and sequence. That said, it is not so much Catherine's comprehensive grasp of Western history that amazes me but her uncanny talent for somehow knowing when her homesick sister needs to be airmailed a new pair of pajamas, even when that sister is all the way over in Bangkok and feeling very lonely. In return for all Catherine's kindness and generosity, I have offered her one lovingly crafted footnote.

  I thank all the other early readers of this book for their insights and encouragement: Darcey, Cat, Ann (the word "pachyderm" is for her), Cree, Brian (this book will always be known as Weddings and Evictions just between us), Mom, Dad, Sheryl, Iva, Bernadette, Terry, Deborah (who gently suggested that I might want to mention the word "feminism" in a book about marriage), Uncle Nick (my most loyal supporter since forever), Susan, Shea (who listened to hours and hours and hours of my early ideas on this subject), Margaret, Sarah, Jonny, and John.

  I thank Michael Knight for offering me a job and a room in Knoxville in 2005, and for knowing me well enough to realize that I would much prefer living in a crazy old residency hotel than anywhere else in town.

  I thank Peter and Marianne Blythe for sharing their couch and their encouragement with Felipe when he landed in Australia desperate and fresh out of jail. With two new babies, a dog, a bird, and the wonderful young Tayla all living under one roof, the Blythes' house was already overflowing, but somehow Peter and Marianne made room for one more needy refugee. I also thank Rick and Clare Hinton in Canberra, for guiding the Australian end of Felipe's immigration process, and for watching diligently over the mail. Even from half a world away, they are perfect neighbors.

  On the subject of great Australians, I thank Erica, Zo, and Tara--my amazing stepkids and daughter-in-law--for welcoming me so warmly into their lives. I must especially credit Erica for giving me the sweetest compliment of my life: "Thank you, Liz, for not being a bimbo." (My pleasure, sweetheart. And right back at you.)

  I thank Ernie Sesskin and Brian Foster and Eileen Marolla for guiding--purely out of the real estate-loving goodness of their hearts-- the entire complicated transaction of helping Felipe and me buy a house in New Jersey from the other side of the world. There's nothing like receiving a hand-drawn floor plan at three o'clock in the morning to know that somebody's got your back.

  I thank Armenia de Oliveira for leaping into action in Rio de Janeiro to save Felipe's immigration process on that end. Also holding up the Brazilian front, as always, have been the wonderful Claucia and Fernando Chevarria--who were just as relentless in their pursuit of antique military records as they were in their encouragement and love.

  I thank Brian Getson, our immigration lawyer, for his thoroughness and patience, and I thank Andrew Brenner for helping us find Brian in the first place.

  I thank Tanya Hughes (for offering me a room of my own at the beginning of this process) and Rayya Elias (for offering me a room of my own at the end).

  I thank Roger LaPhoque and Dr. Charles Henn for their hospitality and elegance at the budget oasis of the Atlanta Hotel in Bangkok. The Atlanta is a wonder that must be seen to be believed, and even then it cannot really be believed.

  I thank Sarah Chalfant for her endless confidence in me, and for her years of constant encircling protection. I thank Kassie Evashevski, Ernie Marshall, Miriam Feuerle, and Julie Mancini for completing that circle.

  I thank Paul Slovak, Clare Ferraro, Kathryn Court, and everyone else at Viking Penguin for their patience as I wrote this book. There are not many people left in the world of publishing who would have said "Take as much time as you need" to a writer who had just missed a major deadline. Throughout this entire process, nobody (except myself) has put any pressure on me whatsoever, and that has been a rare gift. Their care hearkens back to an earlier and more gracious way of doing business, and I am grateful to have been the recipient of such decency.

  I thank my family--especially my parents and my grandmother, Maude Olson--for not hesitating to allow me to explore in print my very personal feelings about some of their most complicated life decisions.

  I thank Officer Tom of the United States Department of Homeland Security for treating Felipe with such an unexpected degree of kindness during his arrest and detention. And that is the most surreal sentence I have ever written in my life, but there it is. (We're not really sure that your name was actually "Tom," sir, but that's how we both remembered it, and I hope that at least you know who you are: a most unlikely agent of destiny who made a bad experience far less bad than it might have been.)

  I thank Frenchtown for bringing us home.

  Lastly, I offer my greatest gratitude to the man who is now my husband. He is a private person by nature, but unfortunately his privacy ended the day he met me. (He is now known to an awful lot of strangers around the world as "that Brazilian guy from Eat, Pray, Love.") In my defense, I have to say that I did give him an early chance to dodge all this exposure. Back when we were first courting, there came an awkward moment when I had to confess that I was a writer, and what that meant for him. If he stayed with me, I warned, he would eventually end up revealed in my books and in my stories. There was no way of getting around it; that's simply how it goes. His best chance, I made clear, would be to leave right then, while there was still time to escape with dignity and discretion intact.

  Despite all my warnings, though, he stayed. And he stays with me still. I believe this has been a great act of love and compassion on his part. Somewhere along the line, this wonderful man seems to have recognized that my life would not have a coherent story line anymore without him at the center of it.

  1 Pardon me for a moment. This is such an important and complicated point that it warrants the only footnote of this whole book. When sociologists say that "marriage is extremely good for children," what they really mean is that stability is extremely good for children. It has been categorically proven that children thrive in environments where they are not subjected to constant unsettling emotional changes--such as, for instance, an endless rotation of Mom's or Dad's new romantic partners cycling in and out of the home. Marriage tends to stabilize families and prevent such upheavals, but not necessarily. These days, for instance, a child born to an unmarried couple in Sweden (where legal marriage is increasingly passe, but where family bonds are quite solid) has a greater chance of living forever with the same parents than a child born to a married couple in America (where marriage is still revered but divorce runs rampant). Children need constancy and familiarity. Marriage encourages, but cannot guarantee, familial solidity. Unmarried couples and single parents and even grandparents can create calm and stable environments in which children can thrive, outside the bonds of legal matrimony. I just wanted to be very clear about that. Sorry for the interruption, and thanks.