Committed

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Social Integration. The more tightly woven a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be. The fact that Americans today are less likely to know their neighbors, belong to social clubs, or live near kin has had a seriously destabilizing effect on marriage, across the board.

Religiousness. The more religious a couple is, the more likely they are to stay married, though faith offers only a slight edge. Born-again Christians in America have a divorce rate that is only 2 percent lower

“vaguely spiritual.” (As Felipe explains: “One of us is spiritual; the other is merely vague.”)

Gender Fairness. Here’s a juicy one. Marriages based on a traditional, restrictive sense about a woman’s place in the home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female and thankless household chores.

he has always believed a woman’s place is in the kitchen . . . sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner.

Factors in lasting marriages Rutgers report

a statistician at Stanford University, warns me against putting too much weight on these sorts of studies anyhow. They are not meant to be read like tea leaves, apparently. Mary especially cautions me to look carefully at any matrimonial research that measures such concepts as “happiness,” since happiness is not exactly scientifically quantifiable. Moreover, just because a statistical study shows a link between two ideas (higher education and marital resilience, for instance) doesn’t mean that one necessarily follows from the other.

statistical studies have also proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that drowning rates in America are highest in geographical areas with strong ice cream sales. This does not mean, obviously, that buying ice cream causes people to drown. It more likely means that ice cream sales tend to be strong at the beach, and people tend to drown at beaches, because that’s where water tends to be found. Linking the two utterly unrelated notions of ice cream and drowning is a perfect example of a logical fallacy, and statistical studies are often rife with such red herrings.

Rutgers report and tried to concoct a template for the least possible divorce-prone couple in America, I came up with quite a Frankensteinian duo. First, you must find yourself two people of the same race, age, religion, cultural background, and intellectual level whose parents had never divorced. Make these two people wait until they are about forty-five years old before you allow them to marry—without letting them live together first, of course. Ensure that they both fervently believe in God and that they utterly embrace family values, but forbid them to have any children of their own. (Also, the husband must warmly embrace the precepts of feminism.) Make them live in the same town as their families, and see to it that they spend many happy hours bowling and playing cards with their neighbors—that is, while they’re not out there in the world succeeding at the wonderful careers that they each launched on account of their fabulous higher educations. Who are these people?

Formula for highest odds of enduring

The emergency that always gets you in the end is the one you didn’t prepare for. Nobody sings, in other words, until the fat lady sings.

desperately did not want to sell this man a bill of goods, or offer up some idealized seductive performance of myself.

Seduction works full-time as Desire’s handmaiden:

presented to him a list of my very worst character flaws, just so I would be certain he had been fairly warned. (Call it a prenuptial informed consent release.) And here is what I came up with as my most deplorable faults—or at least once I had painstakingly narrowed them down to the top five: 1. I think very highly of my own opinion. I generally believe that I know best how everyone in the world should be living their lives—and you, most of all, will be the victim of this. 2. I require an amount of devotional attention that would have made Marie Antoinette blush. 3. I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more than I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I’ve overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance. 4. I am openly prideful, secretly judgmental, and cowardly in conflict. All these things collude at times and turn me into a big fat liar. 5. And my most dishonorable fault of all: Though it takes me a long while to get to this point, the moment I have decided that somebody is unforgivable, that person will very likely remain unforgiven for life—all too often cut off forever, without fair warning, explanation, or another chance.

I’d certainly never codified my failings for anyone so honestly before. But when I presented Felipe with this inventory of lamentable character defects, he took in the news without apparent disquiet. In fact, he just smiled and said, “Is there anything you would now like to tell me about yourself that I didn’t already know?”

Informed consent release—transparently listing our worst characteristics

when I first started in the jewelry business,” Felipe went on, “I used to get in trouble because I’d get too excited about the one or two perfect aquamarines in the parcel, and I wouldn’t pay as much attention to the junk they threw in there. After I got burned enough times, I finally got wise and learned this: You have to ignore the perfect gemstones. Don’t even look at them twice because they’re blinding. Just put them away and have a careful look at the really bad stones. Look at them for a long time, and then ask yourself honestly, ‘Can I work with these? Can I make something out of this?’ Otherwise, you’ve just spent a whole lot of money on one or two gorgeous aquamarines buried inside a big heap of worthless crap.

People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of that.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.”

“Would you like to know my worst faults now?” Felipe asked. I must admit that I thought to myself, I already know your worst faults, mister. But before I could speak, he relayed the facts quickly and bluntly, as only a man who is all too familiar with himself can do. “I’ve always been good at making money,” he said, “but I never learned how to save the shit. I drink too much wine. I was overprotective of my children and I’ll probably always be overprotective of you. I’m paranoid—my natural Brazilianness makes me that way—so whenever I misunderstand what’s going on around me, I always assume the worst. I’ve lost friends because of this, and I always regret it, but that’s just the way I am. I can be antisocial and temperamental and defensive. I am a man of routine, which means I’m boring. I have very little patience with idiots.” He smiled and tried to leaven up the moment. “Also, I can’t look at you without wanting to have sex with you.” “I can work with that,” I said. There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. They are no laughing matter, these faults. They can harm. They can undo. My narcissistic neediness, left unchecked, has every bit as much potential to sabotage a relationship as Felipe’s financial daredevilry, o...

“Would you like to know my worst faults now?” Felipe asked. I must admit that I thought to myself, I already know your worst faults, mister.

“I’ve always been good at making money,” he said, “but I never learned how to save the shit. I drink too much wine. I was overprotective of my children and I’ll probably always be overprotective of you.

whenever I misunderstand what’s going on around me, I always assume the worst.

I can be antisocial and temperamental and defensive. I am a man of routine, which means I’m boring. I have very little patience with idiots.”

There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. They are no laughing matter, these faults. They can harm. They can undo. My narcissistic neediness, left unchecked, has every bit as much potential to sabotage a relationship as Felipe’s financial daredevilry, or his hastiness to assume the worst in moments of uncertainty. If we are at all self-aware, we work hard to keep these more dicey aspects of our natures under control, but they don’t go away.

Also good to note: If Felipe has character flaws that he cannot change in himself, it would be unwise of me to believe that I could change them on his behalf. Likewise in reverse, of course. And some of the things that we cannot change about ourselves are mirthless to behold. To be fully seen by somebody, then, and to be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous.

With all respect to the Buddha and to the early Christian celibates, I sometimes wonder if all this teaching about nonattachment and the spiritual importance of monastic solitude might be denying us something quite vital. Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness. “All human beings have failings,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. (And she—one-half of a very complex, sometimes unhappy, but ultimately epic marriage—knew what she was talking about.) “All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who have lived together over long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.” Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone’s contradictions—someone’...

I sometimes wonder if all this teaching about nonattachment and the spiritual importance of monastic solitude might be denying us something quite vital. Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness. “All human beings have failings,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. (And she—one-half of a very complex, sometimes unhappy, but ultimately epic marriage—knew what she was talking about.) “All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who have lived together ov...

Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone’s contradictions—someone’s idiocies, even—is a kind of divine act. Perhaps transcendence can be found not only on solitary mountaintops or in monastic settings, but also at your own kitchen table, ...

So, no, when I mention “tolerance,” I’m not talking about learning how to stomach pure awfulness. What I am talking about is learning how to accommodate your life as generously as possible around a basically decent human being who can sometimes be an unmitigated pain in the ass. In this regard, the marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgiveness, as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Mundane this may be, yes. Devoid of any rock-star moments of divine ecstasy, certainly. But maybe such tiny acts of household tolerance are a miracle in some other way—in some quietly measureless way—all the same?

We humans come into this world—as Aristophanes so beautifully explained—feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find somebody who will recognize us and repair us. (Or re-pair us.) Desire is the severed umbilicus that is always with us, always bleeding and wanting and longing for flawless union. Forgiveness is the nurse who knows that such immaculate mergers are impossible, but that maybe we can live on together anyhow if we are polite and kind and careful not to spill too much blood.

TODAY THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME IS HOW TO JUGGLE WORK, LOVE, HOME AND CHILDREN. —Betty Friedan, The Second Stage

thought that perhaps there are times when a community, in order to maintain its cohesion, must share not only money and not only resources, but also a sense of collective accountability. Maybe all our marriages must be linked to each other somehow, woven on a larger social loom, in order to endure. Which is why I made a little note to myself that day in Laos: Don’t privatize your marriage to Felipe so much that it becomes deoxygenated, isolated, solitary, vulnerable

a Western-style problem—one that we’ve been watching play out in the Western world for several generations now, ever since avenues to wealth became more available to women. One of the first things that changes in any society when women start to earn their own income is the nature of marriage. You see this trend across all nations and all people. The more financially autonomous a woman becomes, the later in life she will get married, if ever. Some people decry this as the Breakdown of Society, and suggest that female economic independence is destroying happy marriages. But traditionalists who look back nostalgically on the halcyon days when women stayed at home and tended to their families, and when divorce rates were much lower than they are today, should keep in mind that many women over the centuries remained in wretched marriages because they could not afford to leave. Even today, the income of your average divorced American woman still drops 30 percent after her marriage has ended—and it was much worse in the past. An old adage used to warn, accurately enough: “Every woman is one divorce away from bankruptcy.” Where would a woman leave to, exactly, if she had small children and no education and no way to support herself? We tend to idealize cultures in which people stay married forever, but we must not automatically assume that matrimonial endurance is always a sign of matrimonial contentment. During the Great Depression, for instance, American divorce rates plummeted....

Finances effects in marriage

Noi watched us carefully. She said little during the meal except at one point to remind us, “Don’t just eat the rice—also eat the meat,” because meat is precious and we were valued visitors. So we ate all those slabs of rubbery frog flesh, along with the skin and the occasional bit of bone, chewing through it all without complaint. Felipe asked not once but twice if he could have another serving, which made Noi blush and smile at her pregnant belly in uncontainable pleasure. Though I personally knew that Felipe would rather eat his own sautéed shoe than swallow another hunk of boiled bullfrog, I loved him overwhelmingly again at that moment for his great goodness. You can take this man anywhere, I thought with pride, and he will always know how to comport himself.

marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. I did not invent this fact, and I don’t like saying it, but it’s a sad truth, backed up by study after study. By contrast, marriage as an institution has always 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. Married 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 do single men. “A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1813, but he was dead wrong, or at least with regard to male human happiness. There doesn’t seem to be anything, statistically speaking, that a man does not gain by getting married. Dishearteningly, the reverse is not true. Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, ...

even though the gap has narrowed, the Marriage Benefit Imbalance persists. Given that this is the case, we must pause here for a moment to consider the mystifying question of why—when marriage has been shown again and again to be disproportionately disadvantageous to them—so many women still long for it so deeply. You could argue that maybe women just haven’t read the statistics, but I don’t think the question is that simple. There’s something else going on here about women and marriage—something deeper, something more emotional, something that a mere public service campaign (DO NOT GET MARRIED UNTIL YOU ARE AT LEAST THIRTY YEARS OLD AND ECONOMICALLY SOLVENT!!!) is unlikely to change or to shape. Puzzled by this paradox, I brought up the question by e-mail with some friends of mine back in the States—female friends whom I knew were longing to find husbands. Their deep craving for matrimony was something I had never personally experienced and therefore could never really understand, but now I wanted to see it through their eyes. “What’s this all about?” I asked. I got some thoughtful answers, and some funny answers. One woman composed a long meditation on her desire to find a man who might become, as she elegantly put it, “the co-witness I have always longed for in life.” Another friend said that she wanted to raise a family with somebody “if only to have babies. I want to finally use these giant breasts of mine for their intended purpose.” But women can build partnerships ...

The women who have been most influential to me (mother, grandmothers, aunties) have all been married women in the most traditional sense, and all of them, I would have to submit, gave up a good deal of themselves in that exchange. I don’t need to be told by any sociologist about something called the Marriage Benefit Imbalance; I have witnessed it firsthand since childhood. Moreover, I don’t have to look very far to explain why that imbalance exists. In my family, at least, the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love. As the psychologist Carol Gilligan has written, “Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connection.” This fierce instinct for entwinement has often caused the women in my family to make choices that are bad for them—to repeatedly give up their own health or their own time or their own best interests on behalf of what they perceive as the greater good—perhaps in order to consistently reinforce an imperative sense of specialness, of chosenness, of connection.

I do not entirely understand why the women to whom I am related give over so much of themselves to the care of others, or why I’ve inherited such a big dose of that impulse myself—the impulse to always mend and tend, to weave elaborate nets of care for others, even sometimes to my own detriment. Is such behavior learned? Inherited? Expected? Biologically predetermined? Conventional wisdom gives us only two explanations for this female tendency toward self-sacrifice, and neither satisfies me. We are either told that women are genetically hardwired to be caretakers, or we are told that women have been duped by an unjustly patriarchal world into believing that they’re genetically hardwired to be caretakers. These two opposing views mean that we are always either glorifying or pathologizing women’s selflessness. Women who give up everything for others are seen as either paragons or suckers, saints or fools. I’m not crazy about either explanation, because I don’t see the faces of my female relatives in any of those descriptions. I refuse to accept that the story of women isn’t more nuanced than that.

historian Stephanie Coontz has written, “Until women had access to safe and effective contraception that let them control when to bear children and how many to have, there was only so far they could go in reorganizing their lives and their marriages.” Whereas my grandmother had borne seven children, my mother bore only two. That’s a massive difference within just one generation. Mom also had a vacuum cleaner and indoor plumbing, so things were a little easier for her all around. This left a sliver of time in my mother’s life to start thinking about other things, and by the 1970s, there were a lot of other things to think about.

Foremost among these were issues relating to women’s bodies and women’s sexual health, and the hypocrisies intertwined therein. Back in her small Minnesota farming community, my mother had grown up witnessing a particularly unpleasant drama unfold year after year, in household after household, when inevitably a young girl would find herself pregnant and would “have to get married.” In fact, this was how most marriages came to pass. But every time it happened—every single time—it would be treated as a full-on scandal for the girl’s family and a crisis of public humiliation for the girl herself. Every single time, the community behaved as though such a shocking event had never before occurred, much less five times a year, in families from every possible background. Yet somehow the young man in question—the impregnator—was spared disgrace. He was generally allowed to be seen as an innocent, or sometimes even as the victim of seduction or entrapment. If he married the girl, she was deemed lucky. It was an act of charity, almost. If he didn’t marry her, the girl would be sent away for the duration of the pregnancy, while the boy remained in school, or on the farm, carrying on as if nothing had happened. It was as though, in the community’s mind, the boy had not even been present in the room when the original sexual act had occurred. His role in the conception was strangely, almost biblically, immaculate. My mother had observed this drama throughout her formative years and at a ...

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. June Carter Cash’s never-recorded songs rest in that silent graveyard, for instance, alongside my mother’s modest but eminently worthy career. And so these women adapt to their new reality. They grieve in their own ways—often invisibly—and move on. The women in my family, anyhow, are very good at swallowing disappointment and moving on. They have, it has always seemed to me, a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. They are mighty in their malleability, almost to the point of a superhuman power. I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsolete, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required, and demonstrated epic patience in other more subtle circumstances.

My father had none of that elasticity. He was a man, an engineer, fixed and steady. He was always the same. He was Dad. He was the rock in the stream. We all moved around him, but my mother most of all. She was mercury, the tide. Due to this supreme adaptability, she created the best possible world for us within her home. She made the decision to quit her job and stay home because she believed this choice would most benefit her family, and, I must say, it did benefit us. When Mom quit her job, all of our lives (except hers, I mean) became much nicer. My dad had a full-time wife again, and Catherine and I had a full-time mom. My sister and I, to be honest, hadn’t loved the days when Mom worked at Planned Parenthood. There were no quality day-care options in our hometown back then, so we’d often find ourselves having to go to the houses of various neighbors after school. Aside from happy access to our neighborhood televisions (we didn’t have the stupendous luxury of TV in our own house), Catherine and I always hated these patched-together babysitting arrangements. Frankly, we were delighted when our mother gave up her dreams and came home to take care of us. Most of all, though, I believe that my sister and I benefited incalculably from Mom’s decision to stay married to our father. Divorce sucks for kids, and it can leave lingering psychological scars. We were spared all that. We had an attentive mom at home who met us at the door every day after school, who supervised our d...

While he expresses zero tolerance toward idiots and incompetents, I think that behind every incompetent idiot there lies a really sweet person having a bad day.

I forget sometimes. I have to say this, because I think it’s such an important point when it comes to marriage: I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men—for certain people—to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents. I can still remember the anguished look on an old friend’s 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?” I could not bring myself to break the bad news to my devastated friend that most days, unfortunately, there is no nuclear holocaust. Most days, unfortunately, the only thing his wife had really needed was a lit...

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Stonewalling, Defensiveness, Criticism, and Contempt. The trick I had just used—repeating back to Felipe his own frustration in order to indicate that I was listening to him and that I cared—is something the Gottmans call “Turning Toward Your Partner.” It’s supposed to defuse arguments. It doesn’t always work.

An overflow of emotions like this signifies what John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman call “flooding”—the point at which you get so tired or frustrated that your mind becomes deluged (and deluded) by anger. A surefire indication that flooding is imminent is when you start using the words “always” or “never” in your 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. As an old friend of mine once told me, you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.