Eat, Pray, Love.C-c-commit?
The other day, I unintentionally gave my friend Ria a gift. We had not seen each other in a while and so I wasn’t all that surprised when she sprang the question girlfriends who haven’t been in touch automatically ask each other: How was the “love life”? The love life was fine, I told her, thank you. How was hers? She made a face. Was I still planning on “settling down”? Yes, it would be nice. But not soon? Nope, not soon. Wasn’t I worried that it might be too late by then to have kids? No, I said. She looked wide-eyed and curious. I took this as an invitation to elaborate. And so I did. At the end of what turned out to be an impromptu spiel, she kept saying how glad she was to have run into me again and could she please record what I said? So she could just play it back to the next person who would ask her why she wasn’t married yet? I told her to bring a recorder the next time we meet.
A better idea, however, came to me the following day: recommend she go to the nearest bookstore and get Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, photocopy the pertinent pages so when “The Question” is sprung upon her again she could simply reach into her bag and wordlessly give that person a handout. It wouldn’t save trees, but it would save the other person’s life because I suspect women like my 31-year-old friend Ria are nearing the end of their rope and may no longer be capable of responding with magnanimity and non-violence in the face of such constant emotional and psychological harassment.
I know I was murderous at that age, when I was made to feel that I was letting everybody down by not donning a white dress and rushing head-long towards my groom, as if I wasn’t playing my supposed role right, as if I was stubbornly and willfully fighting the inevitable. By the time I reached my mid-30’s with no husband and child in sight, I had heard everything there was to throw at such unmarried and childless women: “The clock is ticking,” “The ship is sailing,” “You’re not getting any younger” (Me, perplexed: “Other than Benjamin Button, who is?”) At one point, it was even suggested that I may have “commitment issues.”
What was with the haste to have us wed, as if we might somehow miss the boat to salvation? If marriage was as big and important as people were saying it was,
shouldn’t we be spending more time studying this institution to know just what is required of us, what we’re getting ourselves into? And when we do have an idea, shouldn’t we be preparing ourselves for it? Given the number of married couples that have bitterly separated (despite there being no divorce in this country) and I know many such couples shouldn’t we be figuring out our personal feelings towards it so that we may, at least, decide whether or not marriage is for us?
Elizabeth Gilbert, thankfully, does half the work for us in Committed, the follow-up to her international bestselling memoir (and a Brad Pitt-produced film starring Julia Roberts opening this October) on regaining her self-entitled Eat, Pray, Love. A blushing, giddy bride in her early 20s and a survivor of a long, drawn-out divorce just a few years later, Gilbert was understandably wary of matrimony, even or especially when she fell in love again. Felipe, the Brazilian-born Australian citizen she met in Bali on the last leg of her Eat, Pray, Love journey and who had gone through a difficult divorce himself, shared Gilbert’s not-so-great feelings towards marriage. Thus, in the name of love and deep consideration for each other, they promised to “never, ever, under any circumstances, get married.”
But this promise would be broken when it became clear that the only way Felipe would be allowed to enter the US again, after being detained at an American border crossing, was if the couple got married. In an effort to allay her fears about reentering an institution that had all but spat her out, for 10 months, while waiting for Felipe’s papers to be processed, Gilbert threw herself into an earnest study of matrimony. She pored over history books on the subject, read the scientific studies, ordered videos on the Internet, spoke to friends, family, tribeswomen basically anyone patient enough to answer her questions. And she had many.
It was the effort she should have taken if she knew enough to do so then before entering her first marriage. Her discoveries and insights about marriage, which, generous writer that she is, she shares in this book, are so surprising and so enlightening that I can’t imagine anyone still treating marriage as lightly as getting a haircut (“So, when are you getting married?”) after reading it.
One of the more striking things Gilbert says for me, at least about marriage is that it does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. “I did not invent this fact,” she writes, “and I don’t like saying it, but it’s a sad truth, backed up by study after study after study.”
Forgive me for lifting a whole chunk of that passage here, but this is gold: “By contrast, marriage as an institution has 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. Men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men excel at their careers above single men; married men are far less likely to die a 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 single men do.
Dishearteningly, the reverse is not true. Modern married women do not fare better in life than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women do (you take a seven percent pay cut, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women 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 a 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 women’s life is her own man.”
This fact, Gilbert reports, is what sociologists call the “Marriage Benefit Imbalance.” Even without looking at the statistics, by just observing the marriages around us, this im-balance surfaces loud and clear. Could this have been what my friend Gayle instinctively knew and which prompted her to enter her marriage only when she was certain there was an exit? Could this be why she kept her last name instead of assuming her husband’s to somehow keep things from tilting too much in his direction, to her detriment? Could this be why pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart further proof that she was ahead of her time had her future husband G.P. Putnam promise her a divorce, as her only requirement before marrying him, the moment she decided marriage was not for her?
Divided into eight chapters (“Marriage and Surprises,” “Marriage and Expectation,” “Marriage and History,” “Marriage and Infatuation,” “Marriage and Women,” “Marriage and Autonomy,” “Marriage and Subversion,” “Marriage and Ceremony”), Committed is as thorough, as incisive and as personal as anyone can get on the subject of the institution; it should be required reading for couples mulling over that contract signing.
Love and marriage, this generation is learning the hard way, no longer necessarily go together like a horse and carriage. (I mean, really, save for a few tourists in Intramuros, the horse and carriage holds little attraction for people these days.)
So before picking out the ring or the dress or the church, please pick up this book. Pick it up for your partner. Pick it up for the people around you who worry that you might be “missing out” or “missing your chance.” But most of all, pick it up for yourself, as a reminder of why you are where you are. Because I suspect it’s not a fear of commitment (your supposed “commitment issues”) that’s keeping you “still unmarried” but, rather, an honest desire to get it right the first time. If, and only if, you decide marriage and, yes, children are for you.
This is essentially what I told my friend the other day. Next time I am asked about “settling down,” though, I hope I can save the spiel and, instead, remember to smile, reach into my bag and wordlessly offer a printed handout.
