BOOK REVIEW
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage
By Elizabeth Gilbert, published January 2010
You might know her as the author of the New York Times number one bestseller Eat Pray Love, but you might not know she lives just outside Philadelphia, so she is fairly local. Reading Liz Gilbert (yes, I am now on a first name basis with her, ha ha; at least I feel like it) is like savoring a long letter from your smartest, coolest girlfriend. Committed is a departure from her previous book (and she’s written several other successful books, which allowed her to make the adventure-filled and healing voyages she wrote about in Eat Pray Love).
People generally have strong feelings about Eat Pray Love – they love it or they really don’t love it. I first spotted a recommendation for it in Philadelphia Magazine and was later given a copy by a friend who thought I could use it at the time. Boy, was she right. If you can’t relate to Liz’s struggles and triumphs, you have probably not ever been divorced.
Liz is now fully recovered from her divorce, well, she would say, as recovered as you can be, though it took years. Committed is part sociology and part-autobiography, an explanation of how she ended up married again after swearing off matrimony forever, as did her new partner. She deals with setbacks not only by traveling but by researching – in this case, a good sifting of marriage customs throughout history.
The parts about the women in her family are fascinating examples of what women in different generations have had to deal with as feminism blossomed in the twentieth century. If you have not read Stephanie Coontz’s book Marriage: A History (which I keep meaning to), you will find this an eye-opening challenge to common beliefs about marriage, and you will learn how many of them evolved, when the church became involved in marriage, and what amazingly tolerant customs exist in other countries, such as Iran.
Some interesting tidbits: As soon as people stop marrying for pragmatic reasons (such
as family mergers, economics, and community pressures) and start marrying for love, divorce rates soar. Second marriages are not statistically doomed after all. A Rutgers study listing the seven features enduring marriages have in common will have you taking inventory of your current and past relationships. Surprisingly, one element that does not improve a marriage is having children at home -- the study found that higher-satisfaction marriages involve children who are grown or no children.
Another survey noted that the quality young women most want in a husband is his ability to “inspire” them, whereas the wished-for qualities in the 1920s were more commonly “decency” or the ability to provide. And have you heard about the Marriage Benefit Imbalance? It’s not good news for women, since marriage statistically puts them behind in terms of health, wealth, happiness, risk for violence, and life expectancy, while doing just the opposite for men. So why do so many women want it so much? The author attempts to answer this too.
Thank you, Liz, for pointing out the common sense reasons for legalizing gay marriage. That only made me like her more.
I enjoyed the unusual format of non-fiction mixed with personal story and look forward to seeing this author at the Free Library. I think I would enjoy anything by Elizabeth Gilbert because of her warmth and wit, her ability to admit her own failings, and her creative ways of tackling both interesting subjects as well as life’s challenges.
