Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert (“Liz”), bestselling author of Eat, Love, Pray recently released her latest book, Committed, A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever been, is thinking about being, or currently is, in a committed relationship.

It’s a great read, filled with oodles of food for thought. Liz, after a bitter divorce, has sworn off marriage forever. She meets and falls in love with Felipe, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. He too has vowed never to marry again. It’s perfect—a relationship in which their mutual commitment includes the vow to never, ever get married. Unfortunately, the US Government has different ideas. Felipe will be allowed to live in the US only if he and Liz get married. Sentenced to wed (her words), Liz begins a journey to discover the history and meaning of marriage, all in her quest to come to terms with the institution she vowed never to be in.

While Liz and Felipe waited a year for attorneys and government officials to sort things out, they traveled throughout Southeast Asia. Liz spent that time putting “effort into unraveling the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is.”

She worried about getting it wrong again. She worried that maybe she wasn’t cut out for marriage. She worried that being “legally” married would ruin their perfectly good relationship. She worried about staying monogamous and falling out of love. She worried about what personal sacrifices she would have to make. She asked questions and looked for answers from the women of Hmong villages in Vietnam, the women of her family, and just about anybody else willing to sit and chat for a while.

In the end, it all works out for Liz and Felipe and (so far at least) Liz appears to have come to terms with the institution of marriage.

I enjoyed the book for many reasons but one of the things I most enjoyed is the historical discussion of marriage and how it has evolved to suit the society and culture of the time. Until recent history, love has had little to do with marriage and its purpose has been everything from an arrangement to manage property to the creation of political alliances. In a review of the book, Ariel Levy in The New Yorker states:

“For contemporary political purposes, marriage is often depicted as a timeless and unchanging institution; actually, it has been enormously elastic throughout history and across cultures. In nineteenth-century China, it was perfectly acceptable for a young woman to marry a dead man, an arrangement called a “ghost marriage,” which enabled families to consolidate their wealth and power and allowed enterprising young women to pursue their ambitions without the interference of a living husband or children. . . Among Eskimo in northern Alaska, there was a tradition of creating co-spousal arrangements in which a quartet swapped husbands and wives. Shiites and Babylonian Jews recognized . . . temporary marriages. If a man was granted a ‘wife for a day,’ the couple could be seen in public together and even have sex. ‘The man and woman had no obligation toward each other once the contract was over’ . . . Couples in modern revolutionary Iran can still petition mullahs for a similar marital day pass.”

Wow! Who knew?

Anyhoo, this is a great read and I wholeheartedly recommend this book.