I just started reading “Committed” by Elizabeth Gilbert. I might be the only person left on the planet who has not yet read “Eat, Pray, Love”, but I’m just not drawn to it at all. This book, on the other hand, seemed very appealing to me. It’s part memoir, part history lesson on marriage. Gilbert famously went through an awful divorce, and had sworn she would never get married again. But then she meets and falls madly in love with Felipe. He’s also been through an awful divorce and, while they swear lifelong commitment to each other, they also swear they will never get married. Until Felipe is denied entry into the U.S. after one-too-many visas and they find that, if they want to stay together in the home they’ve built in the U.S., they must marry. Gilbert then sets to learning as much as she can about marriage, so that she might make terms with it before entering it once again.
I can really relate to her impulse there – to learn all about the socio-political history of marriage when faced with it – because I’ve been doing much the same thing as of late. Except I waited until AFTER I got married to do it. My marriage is basically, as I believe really any marriage is, a huge leap of faith. I love my husband very much, but I don’t think that love alone is enough. I’ve loved other men, and yet I’ve known (if not always immediately, eventually) that we could never have successful, sustained relationships. I married Trevor because I think we can, because I trust him to work at it with me, and because he is generally very easy to live with. However, I don’t know that anyone ever marries anyone else because they are sure it will work – maybe there are people out there who’ve had this experience, but my experience has been one of trust, faith, and a willingness on my part to put in the work it takes to make my marriage last. If any one of those key elements were missing, I don’t know that I would’ve attempted it based solely on romantic love.
What all this means though is that I’m not sure our marriage will work, will last. And I’ve mostly made peace with that now. But my first reaction, like Elizabeth Gilbert’s, was just that I felt this huge need to just KNOW MORE. What is this institution? How did it come to be? What did it mean then? What does it mean now? How does it apply to me? How do I do it? How have other people done it? Unlike Gilbert, there is still a sizeable stack of unread books about marriage sitting on my nightstand – I just never got that far. Somewhere along the way I guess I decided I didn’t really care about the context of my marriage – just the content. But I’ll read her book, because it’s only one book instead of many and she’s already done all the work for me.
When I say I just started the book, I really mean it, and my first observation about it actually has nothing at all to do with marriage.
I just finished reading the opening “Note to the Reader”, in which Gilbert writes about how she tried to write the book as though she were just writing it for 27 readers: 27 women who “constitute (her) small but critically important circle of friends, relatives, and neighbors” (all women). I have a couple things to say here. A.) 27?!, B.) “small” circle of friends? I mean, she’s older than I am – and I hear she did have quite an eye-opening finding-herself experience while traveling the world, no doubt meeting many amazing women along the way, some of whom I’m sure are part of this list. But, 27? Maybe I’m being too cynical. Or, more likely, maybe I’m just jealous. I envision being surrounded by all these amazing, inspiring people – counting them as friends and they counting me as a friend, too. Mostly I envision that some of them, after we’ve met and fallen for each other, of course – will move to Spain, and Prague, and small Greek islands – and then I will visit them there, where I will have very “Under the Tuscan Sun” experiences (which, P.S., is pretty much how I think of “Eat, Pray, Love” playing out, having never read it). However, I really don’t know if I can ever envision having 27 of these kinds of individuals in my life. That seems like too much good fortune for anyone.
Shawna, Alyssa, Sarah, Jeni, Esther, and my mom, Laura – these are the women I would write my book for. It’s so interesting to me when put like that because that would just be such a challenge, to write something that would appeal to all 6 women, each with their own insanely different experiences and worldviews. But then I think it would keep me true to myself, it would keep my voice authentic and genuine – because the one thing these women have in common is intimate knowledge of the real me.
Shawna and I grew up apart, but never grew apart, despite our differences.
Alyssa is my war buddy – we went through high school together, and she has an uncanny, encyclopedic knowledge of all my likes and dislikes. She is the life of the party, and neither of us shy away from the ridiculous.
Sarah knows how my mind works better than I do, usually. She is fiercely intelligent, insanely witty, and always hilarious – I laugh more around her than around anyone else.
Jeni is wise and strong and she always does the right thing even if it is not the easy thing. She is a walking, talking challenge for me to do better, mostly because she is so good and because she believes in me even when I don’t.
Esther is my girlfriend, we would be great for each other if only we were lesbians – she doesn’t let me get away with anything, and she makes me see sides of things I never would’ve been able to see on my own.
My mom is my mom, my best friend, my confidant, and she’s been there for it all.
All of these women are absolutely hilarious in their own distinct ways, and I would fart in front of any one of them without shame or (much) embarrassment, a mark of how well we know each other. But my absolute favorite thing about my friendships with all of these women is that they always pick up right where we left them, regardless of time or distance or a marked absence of phone calls or emails. When I’ve lost my way and I can’t pick up the right thread in my writing and nothing is coming out the way I want, these are the women I will write for. I can only hope that one day, I, too, will have 27. Yeesh, Elizabeth Gilbert. Stop bragging.
