Committed

by Elizabeth Gilbert

every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

“What would you do now, if you were in our situation?”

I had a friend from college who deliberately narrowed down her life’s options, as though to vaccinate herself against overly ambitious expectations. She skipped a career and ignored the lure of travel to instead move back home and marry her high school sweetheart. With unwavering confidence, she announced that she would become “only” a wife and mother. The simplicity of this arrangement felt utterly safe to her—certainly compared to the convulsions of indecision that so many of her more ambitious peers (myself included) were suffering. But when her husband left her twelve years later for a younger woman, my friend’s rage and sense of betrayal were as ferocious as anything I’ve ever seen. She virtually imploded with resentment—not so much against her husband, but against the universe, which she perceived to have broken a sacred contract with her. “I asked for so little!” she kept saying, as though her diminished demands alone should have protected her against any disappointments.

Felipe—that we should somehow be answerable for every aspect of each other’s joy and happiness. That our very job description as spouses was to be each other’s everything.

she came to feel she had a choice: She could either have a family or she could have a calling, but she couldn’t figure how to do both without support and encouragement from her husband. So she quit.

blessing. But don’t necessarily be fooled into thinking that modern life is therefore easy, or that modern life carries no grieving and loss for women anymore. I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried—in neat little rows—the personal dreams they have given up for their families.

face when he told me, several years ago, that his wife was leaving him. Her complaint, apparently, was that she was overwhelmingly lonely, that he “wasn’t there for her”—but he could not begin to understand what this meant. He felt he had been breaking his back to take care of his wife for years. “Okay,” he admitted, “so maybe I wasn’t there for her emotionally , but by God, I provided for that woman! I worked two jobs for her! Doesn’t that show that I loved her? She should have known that I would have done anything to keep providing for her and protecting her! If a nuclear holocaust ever struck, I would’ve picked her up and thrown her over my shoulder and carried her across the burning landscape to safety—and she knew that about me! How could she say I wasn’t there for her?”

here. I just needed him to relax into the situation as it was. Yes, of course, it would have been much nicer to be back home,

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Stonewalling, Defensiveness, Criticism, and Contempt.

argument. The Gottmans call this “Going Universal” (as in: “You always let me down like this!” or “I can never count on you!”). Such language absolutely murders any chance of fair or intelligent discourse. Once you have Flooded, once you have Gone Universal on somebody’s ass, all hell breaks loose. It’s really best not to let that happen.

couple must practice preemptive conflict resolution, arresting an argument before it can even begin. So this had become a code phrase of ours, a signpost to mind the gap and beware of falling rocks. It was a tool that we pulled out every now and again in particularly tense moments. It

The great expansion we feel in our hearts when we fall in love is matched only by the great restrictions that will necessarily follow.

In fact, it is the ultimate and only consistently subversive organization. Only the family has continued throughout history, and still continues, to undermine the State. The