Book Review by Sally Cant

Committed – A Love Story – By Elizabeth Gilbert

Committed : (A sceptic makes peace with marriage) by Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story of Elizabeth coming to terms with marriage. Gilbert’s very popular novel, Eat Pray Love records her journey through Italy, India and Indonesia. In Indonesia, she met Felipe, whom she fell in love with.

 This book covers her search for what marriage means and helps her to decide if marriage is what she really wants. Elizabeth has already had one bad marriage and she and Felipe were perfectly content to spend the rest of their lives together without a piece of paper deeming them officially recognized as married. Now, if Elizabeth wants her life to be with Felipe, she must come to terms with marriage.

 It was interesting that Gilbert’s book started with her ‘Note to the Reader’ – essentially outlining her concerns about ever being about to write unselfconsciously again, following the unprecedented success of Eat Pray Love. Mired under considerable pressure to ‘perform’ and to please a plethora of high expectation, this extremely self-effacing author became immobilised mid-draft and ended up completely scrapping her first version of Committed, starting again in an entirely new direction – and most importantly, with a new mindset.

 Gilbert’s ambivalence about marriage is genuine. In her Notes to the Reader she comments: “For a multitude of personal reasons, then, the book that I needed to write was exactly this book – another memoir (with extra social historical bonus section) about my efforts to make peace with the complicated institution of marriage”.

 Those who have been through a life-altering and/or soul-destroying divorce will perhaps relate to and revel in this very pervasive analytical side to the book. I thoroughly enjoyed the gloriously researched historical and cultural references so well presented and I could appreciate the fears and challenges Gilbert experienced on her journey to secondary wedded bliss. I actually enjoyed the ride through this writer’s mind, to reconcile her understanding of what her union with Felipe would mean – above and beyond the right to reside once again in the USA together side by side.

 She dissected her book into eight chapters commencing with ‘Marriage and Surprises’ – in which she discovers she must marry her ‘affectionate Brazilian gentleman’, Felipe – or else the United States Department of Homeland Security will hand cuff him and send him on the next flight offshore. She had hoped that by studying marriage that it might somehow mitigate her deep aversion to marriage. She was looking for a way to embrace marriage rather than merely swallowing her fate like an awful pill.

 Chapter Two – Marriage and Expectation – challenges Gilbert to consider her expectations of Marriage. She looks at history and how expectations of marriage have changed. In the 1920’s women chose a partner based on qualities such as decency, honesty and their ability to provide for a family. But a century later that’s not enough, apparently we want our partner to inspire us. From her first marriage Gilbert had expected inspiration and soaring bliss! And that was what she was expecting once again from her prospective second husband. After researching many other cultures she wonders if in fact she was asking too much of love, too much of marriage.  She writes, perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto the creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate in the first place.

Chapter three: Marriage and History – was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed her interpretation of the history of marriage. It looked at where Marriage came from – people marrying in order to expand their numbers of relatives, where your spouse was not your primary helper, that in fact the main reason was to grow your entire family and consequently your growing support network.  She deconstructs the modern secular law – which looks at the only reason marriage matters under the eyes of the law is that they have come together to produce something in their union be-it children, assets, business and debts. And that all these things need to be managed so that civil society can proceed in a methodical fashion and government will not be stuck with the messy business of raising abandoned babies or supporting bankrupt ex-souses!

 She also explores why she needs a man at all, and comes to the conclusion that she needs him only because she happens to adore him, because his company brings her gladness and comfort. She concluded that she did not need him in almost any of the ways that women have needed men over the centuries. She didn’t need protecting, she didn’t need him financially, she didn’t need to extend her family network, she didn’t need him to father children and she did not feel she needed the social status of ‘married woman’.

 She worried about her motive of marrying for love. That a love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based marriage or an asset-based marriage. That anything the heart has chosen, the heart can always unchoose later. Her reasoning for this is that she believes love-based unions make for strangely fragile tethers.

 In Chapter 4  - Marriage and Infatuation – Gilbert explores her thoughts on how important it is to really know someone before you take this step. That you cannot really know someone over a short-term vacation. That actual relating is impossible during a state of pitched fever. Real, sane, mature love – the kind that pays the mortgage, does the housework and picks up the kids after school – is based on affection and respect. Another point she makes which is something I grapple with when speaking to engaged couples is the need to feel that the other person somehow ‘completes you’. She is mature enough to determine that having to complete someone is burdensome and mostly futile. She acknowledges that she has faced enough of her own incompleteness to recognize that they belong solely to her.

 Chapter 5 – Marriage and women – comes to the conclusion that one of the things that changes in any society when women start to earn their own income is the nature of marriage. The more financially autonomous a woman becomes, the later in life she will get married – if ever. Many women over the centuries remained in terribly violent and loveless marriages because they could not afford to leave.

 A deeply compassionate, painstakingly researched and often laugh-out-loud-funny exposition on marriage…. With this book, she gracefully, brilliantly transitions from personal memoirist into social historian. Committed is a very real and raw account of Gilbert's internal trials about getting married.

 I adored Gilbert's stories from some of the families and women in the villages she visited and interviewed about marriage during her travels. 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.

 Personally though, I think Gilbert posed an overwhelming number of questions throughout her book, but answered very few – but maybe that’s life! After all what is a ‘good enough’ relationship? And although she undoubtedly knew much more about marriage and where she sat in the equation when she eventually got married to Felipe, I am not convinced that she felt any better about the prospect of getting married or that she had convinced herself that she was marrying because she wanted to and not just because it was being forced on her!

 Having said that – it is wonderful to see a book on Marriage hit the top sellers list. “Committed” is an incredibly thorough, introspective, and ultimately engaging examination into one of life’s most permeating, sought-after social constructs. And this fact alone makes it a book that begs to be read.

 Sally Cant is the Director of The Celebrants Training College and the author of The Heart and Soul of Celebrancy. Sally is a highly respected trainer and presents regularly at National and International forums. She is a member of FIMAC – the Funeral Industry Ministerial Advisory Council, is an Editorial Board member of Threshold Magazine and is a National Committee Member of MAREAA.

www.sallycant.com.au  ; www.celebrantstraining.com.au