Committed (Book Review)

I liked Liz Gilbert’s writing style in Eat Pray Love so I decided to read her second non fiction – Committed. This is the book’s description:

At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who’d been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both were survivors of previous divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which—after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing—gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving into this topic completely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. Told with Gilbert’s trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, Committed attempts to “turn on all the lights” when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, family tradition, social expectations, divorce risks and humbling responsibilities. Gilbert’s memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.

There were moments when I found the author to be quite annoying in this book, but I moved past that because overall, I found it be an informative read. I liked learning about the history of how the institution of marriage evolved – like did you know that the Church used to frown upon it? That was because they thought the end of the world was coming soon and the priority was for people to be priests and nuns. But when the people ignored them and it looked like the world wasn’t ending anytime soon, they embraced the pop culture, gave their blessings and turned marriage into a sacrament. There were also some statistics that showed how women stand to suffer from marriage, from financial to health matters. Of course I don’t know if all the information is true, but they’re all very interesting and have definitely changed my view of marriage.

I liked these nuggets from the book:

It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities. 

Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody – really want him – it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause you a lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain your object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such a primal urgency, you no longer completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own yearnings.

But my favorite is the one about how marital infidelity starts. I think it is the best explanation I have ever read.

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?”

I think this book’s something that I would be keeping on my shelf for future reference. 🙂