Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Such childless women--let's call them the "Auntie Brigade"--have never been very well honored by history, I'm afraid. They are called selfish, frigid, pathetic. Here's one particularly nasty bit of conventional wisdom circulating out there about childless women that I need to dispel here, and that is this: that women who have no children may lead liberated and happy and wealthy lives when they are young, but they will ultimately regret that choice when they reach old age, for they shall all die alone and depressed and full of bitterness. Perhaps you've heard this old chestnut? Just to set the record straight: There is zero sociological evidence to back this up. In fact, recent studies of American nursing homes comparing happiness levels of elderly childless women against happiness levels of women who did have children show no pattern of special misery or joy in one group or the other. But here's what the researchers did discover that makes elderly women miserable across the board: poverty and poor health. Whether you have children or not, then, the prescription seems clear: Save your money, floss your teeth, wear your seatbelt, and keep fit--and you'll be a perfectly happy old bird someday, I guarantee you.

  Just a little free advice there, from your Auntie Liz.

  In leaving no descendents, however, childless aunts do tend to vanish from memory after a mere generation, quickly forgotten, their lives as transitory as butterflies. But they are vital as they live, and they can even be heroic. Even in my own family's recent history, there are stories on both sides of truly magnificent aunties who stepped in and saved the day during emergencies. Often able to accrue education and resources precisely because they were childless, these women had enough spare income and compassion to pay for lifesaving operations, or to rescue the family farm, or to take in a child whose mother had fallen gravely ill. I have a friend who calls these sorts of child-rescuing aunties "sparents"--"spare parents"--and the world is filled with them.

  Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade. My job is not merely to spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world--an ambassador auntie--who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody's family whatsoever. There are people I've been able to help, sometimes fully supporting them for years, because I am not obliged, as a mother would be obliged, to put all my energies and resources into the full-time rearing of a child. There are a whole bunch of Little League uniforms and orthodontist's bills and college educations that I will never have to pay for, thereby freeing up resources to spread more widely across the community. In this way, I, too, foster life. There are many, many ways to foster life. And believe me, every single one of them is essential.

  Jane Austen once wrote to a relative whose first nephew had just been born: "I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible. Now that you have become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence." Jane knew of which she spoke. She herself was a childless auntie, cherished by her nieces and nephews as a marvelous confidante, and remembered always for her "peals of laughter."

  Speaking of writers: From an admittedly biased perspective, I feel the need to mention here that Leo Tolstoy and Truman Capote and all the Bronte sisters were raised by their childless aunts after their real mothers had either died or abandoned them. Tolstoy claimed that his Aunt Toinette was the greatest influence of his life, as she taught him "the moral joy of love." The historian Edward Gibbon, having been orphaned young, was raised by his beloved and childless Aunt Kitty. John Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi, who convinced the boy that he would be an important artist someday. F. Scott Fitzgerald's loyal Aunt Annabel offered to pay for his college education. Frank Lloyd Wright's first building was commissioned by his Aunts Jane and Nell--two lovely old maids who ran a boarding school in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Coco Chanel, orphaned as a child, was raised by her Aunt Gabrielle, who taught her how to sew--a useful skill for the girl, I think we would all agree. Virginia Woolf was deeply influenced by her Aunt Caroline, a Quaker spinster who devoted her life to charitable works, who heard voices and spoke to spirits, and who seemed, as Woolf recalled years later, "a kind of modern prophetess."

  Remember that critical moment in literary history when Marcel Proust bites into his famous madeleine cookie, thereby becoming so overwhelmed by nostalgia that he has no choice but to sit down and write the multivolume epic Remembrance of Things Past? That entire tsunami of eloquent nostalgia was set off by the specific memory of Marcel's beloved Aunt Leonie, who, every Sunday after church, used to share her madeleines with the boy when he was a child.

  And have you ever wondered what Peter Pan really looked like? His creator, J. M. Barrie, answered that question for us back in 1911. For Barrie, Peter Pan's image and his essence and his marvelous spirit of felicity can be found all over the world, hazily reflected "in the faces of many women who have no children."

  That is the Auntie Brigade.

  But this decision of mine--the decision to join the Auntie Brigade rather than enlist in the Mommy Corps--does set me off as being quite different from my own mother, and I still felt there was something that needed to be reconciled within that distinction. This is probably why, in the middle of my travels with Felipe, I called my mom one night from Laos, trying to settle some last lingering questions about her own life and her choices and how they related to my life and my choices.

  We talked for over an hour. My mom was calm and thoughtful, as ever. She did not seem surprised by my line of questioning--in fact, she responded as though she'd been waiting for me to ask. Waiting, perhaps, for years.

  First of all, right off the bat, she was quick to remind me: "I don't regret anything I ever did for you kids."

  "You don't regret giving up the work you loved?" I asked.

  "I refuse to live in regret," she said (which did not exactly answer the question, but felt like an honest start). "There was so much to love about those years I spent at home with you girls. I know you kids in a way that your father will never know you. I was there, witnessing your growth. It was a privilege to see you become adults. I wouldn't have wanted to miss that."

  Also, my mother reminded me that she chose to stay married all those years to the same man because she happens to love my father dearly--which is a good point, and one well taken. It is true that my parents connect not only as friends, but also very much on a bodily level. They are physical in every way together--hiking, biking, and farming side by side. I remember phoning home from college late one winter's night and catching the two of them out of breath. "What have you guys been up to?" I asked, and my mom, giddy with laughter, announced, "We've been sledding!" They had absconded with their ten-year-old neighbor's toboggan and had been making midnight runs down the icy hill behind our house--my mom lying on my father's back and shrieking with adrenalized pleasure while he steered the speeding sled through the moonlight. Who still does this in middle age?

  My parents have always had a certain sexual chemistry, ever since the day they met. "He looked like Paul Newman," my mom recalls of their first encounter, and when my sister once asked my father about his favorite memory of my mom, he did not hesitate to reply, "I have always loved the pleasing nature of your mother's form." He still loves it. My dad is always grabbing at my mom's body as she walks by in the kitchen, always checking her out, admiring her legs, lusting after her. She swats him away with fake shock: "John! Stop it!" But you can tell she relishes the attention. I grew up watching that play out, and I think that's a rare gift--knowing that your parents are physically satisfying to each other. So one big part of my parent's marriage, as my mother was reminding me, has always been lodged somewhere beyond the rational, hidden someplace deep in the sexual body. And that degree of intimacy is something beyond any explanation, beyond any argument.

  Then there is the companionship. My parents have been married for over forty years now. By and large they've worked out their deal. They live in a pretty smooth routine, their habits polished by time's curre
nt. They orbit each other in the same basic pattern every day: coffee, dog, breakfast, newspaper, garden, bills, chores, radio, lunch, groceries, dog, dinner, reading, dog, bed . . . and repeat.

  The poet Jack Gilbert (no relation, sadly for me) wrote that marriage is what happens "between the memorable." He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are "the vacations, and emergencies"--the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody--so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

  Also, my mom had the grace to remind me that night, when I called her from Laos, that she is far from a saint, and that my dad has had to give up parts of himself, too, in order to stay married to her. As my mother generously admitted, she is not always the easiest person to be married to. My father has had to learn how to tolerate and endure the effects of being managed at every turn by a hyperorganized wife. In this regard, the two of them are horribly ill-matched. My father takes life as it comes; my mother makes life happen. An example: My father was out working in the garage one day when he accidentally stirred a small bird from its nest in the rafters. Confused and afraid, the bird settled on the brim of my dad's hat. Not wanting to disturb it any further, my father sat for about an hour on the floor of the garage until the bird decided to fly away. This is a very Dad story. Such a thing would never happen to my mother. She is far too busy to allow dazed little birds to rest on her head while there are chores to be done. Mom waits for no bird.

  Also, while it's true that my mother has given up more of her personal ambitions in marriage than my father ever did, she demands far more out of marriage than he ever will. He is far more accepting of her than she is of him. ("She's the best Carole she can be," he often says, while one gets the feeling that my mother believes her husband could be--maybe even should be--a much better man.) She commands him at every turn. She's subtle and graceful enough in her methods of control that you don't always realize that she's doing it, but trust me: Mom is always steering the boat.

  She comes by this trait honestly. All the women in her family do this. They take over every single aspect of their husbands' lives and then, as my father loves to point out, they absolutely refuse to ever die. No man can outlive an Olson bride. This is simple biological fact. I'm not exaggerating: It has never happened, not in anyone's memory. And no man can escape being completely controlled by an Olson wife. ("I'm warning you," my dad told Felipe at the beginning of our relationship, "if you're going to have any kind of life with Liz, you've got to define your space right now, and then defend it forever.") My father once joked--not really joking--that my mother manages about 95 percent of his life. The wonder of it, he mused, is that she's much more upset about the 5 percent of his life that he won't relinquish than he is about the 95 percent that she utterly dominates.

  Robert Frost wrote that "a man must partly give up being a man" in order to enter into marriage--and I cannot fairly deny this point when it comes to my family. I have written many pages already describing marriage as a repressive tool used against women, but it's important to remember that marriage is often used as a repressive tool against men, too. Marriage is a harness of civilization, linking a man to a set of obligations and thereby containing his restless energies. Traditional societies have long recognized that nothing is more useless to a community than a whole bunch of single, childless young men (aside from their admittedly useful role as cannon fodder, of course). For the most part, single young men have a global reputation for squandering their money on whores and drinking and games and laziness: They contribute nothing. You need to contain such beasts, to bind them into accountability--or so the argument has always gone. You need to convince these young men to put aside their childish things and take up the mantle of adult-hood, to build homes and businesses and to cultivate an interest in their surroundings. It's an ancient truism across countless different cultures that there is no better accountability-forging tool for an irresponsible young man than a good, solid wife.

  This certainly was the case with my parents. "She whipped me into shape," is my dad's summation of the love story. Mostly he's okay with this, though sometimes--say, in the middle of a family gathering, surrounded by his powerful wife and his equally powerful daughters--my father resembles nothing more than a puzzled old circus bear who cannot seem to figure out how he came to be quite so domesticated, or how he came to be perched quite so high up on this strange unicycle. He reminds me in such moments of Zorba the Greek, who replied when asked if he had ever married, "Am I not a man? Of course I've been married. Wife, house, kids, the full catastrophe!" (Zorba's melodramatic angst, by the way, reminds me of the curious fact that, within the Greek Orthodox Church, marriage is regarded not so much as a sacrament, but as a holy martyrdom--the understanding being that successful long-term human partnership requires a certain Death of the Self to those who participate.)

  My parents have each certainly felt that restriction, that small sense of self-death, in their own marriage. I know this to be true. But I'm not sure they've always minded having each other in the way either. When I once asked my father what kind of creature he would like to be in his next life, should there be a next life, he replied without hesitation, "A horse."

  "What kind of horse?" I asked, imagining him as a stallion galloping wildly across the open plains.

  "A nice horse," he said.

  I duly adjusted the picture in my mind. Now I imagined a friendly stallion galloping wildly across the plains.

  "What kind of nice horse?" I probed.

  "A gelding," he pronounced.

  A castrated horse! That was unexpected. The picture in my mind changed completely. Now I envisioned my father as a gentle dray horse, docilely pulling a cart driven by my mother.

  "Why a gelding?" I asked.

  "I've found that life is just easier that way," he replied. "Trust me."

  And so life has been easier for him. In exchange for the almost castrating constraints that marriage has clamped on my father's personal freedoms, he has received stability, prosperity, encouragement in his labors, clean and mended shirts that appear as if by magic in his dresser drawers, a reliable meal at the end of a good day's work. In return, he has worked for my mother, he has been faithful to her, and he submits to her will a solid 95 percent of the time--elbowing her away only when she comes a little bit too close to achieving total world domination. The terms of this contract must be acceptable to both of them because--as my mother reminded me when I phoned her from Laos--their marriage now endures into its fifth decade.

  The terms of my parents' marriage are probably not for me, of course. Whereas my grandmother was a traditional farmwife and my mother was a feminist cusper, I grew up with completely new ideas about the institutions of marriage and family. The relationship I'm likely to build with Felipe is something my sister and I have termed "Wifeless Marriage"--which is to say that nobody in our household will play (or play exclusively) the traditional role of the wife. The more thankless chores that have always fallen on women's shoulders will be balanced out more evenly. And since there will be no babies, you could also call it "Motherless Marriage" I suppose--a model of marriage that my grandmother and mother obviously never experienced. Similarly, the responsibility of breadwinning will not fall entirely on Felipe's shoulders, as it fell to my father and grandfather; indeed, the bulk of the household earnings will probably always be mine. Perhaps in that regard, then, we will have something like a "Husbandless Marriage" as well. Wifeless, childless, husbandless marriages . . . there haven't been a whole lot of those unions in history, so we don't really have a template to work with here
. Felipe and I will have to make up the rules and boundaries of our story as we go along.

  I don't know, though. Maybe everyone has to make up the rules and boundaries of their story as they go along.

  Anyway, when I asked my mother that night on the phone from Laos whether she has been happy in her marriage over the years, she assured me that she'd had a really nice time of it with my father, far more often than not. When I asked her what the happiest period of her life had been, she replied: "Right now. Living with your dad, healthy, financially stable, free. Your father and I pass our days doing our own thing and then we meet at the dinner table together every night. Even after all these years, we still sit there for hours talking and laughing. It's really lovely."

  "That's wonderful," I said.

  There was a pause.

  "Can I say something that I hope doesn't offend you?" she ventured.

  "Go for it."

  "To be perfectly honest, the best part of my life began as soon as you kids grew up and left the house."

  I started laughing (Gee--thanks, Mom!) but she spoke over my laughter with urgency. "I'm serious, Liz. There's something you have to understand about me: I've been raising children my entire life. I grew up in a big family, and I always had to take care of Rod and Terry and Luana when they were little. How many times did I get up in the middle of the night when I was ten years old to clean up somebody who had wet the bed? That was my whole childhood. I never had time for myself. Then, when I was a teenager, I took care of my older brother's kids, always trying to figure out how to do my homework while I was babysitting. Then I had my own family to raise, and I had to give so much of myself over to that. When you and your sister finally left for college, that was the first moment in my life I hadn't been responsible for any children. I loved it. I can't tell you how much I love it. Having your father to myself, having my own time to myself--it's been revolutionary for me. I've never been happier."