Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  And why was I always the one who had to think in such upbeat terms anyhow, while Felipe, frankly, had done little over the last few weeks but sulk over circumstances that were largely out of our control? Why could he never bend to adverse situations with a little more grace? And would it have killed him, by the way, to show a little enthusiasm about the upcoming archeological site?

  I very nearly said this--every word of it, the whole crapping rant of it--but I refrained. An overflow of emotions like this signifies what John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman call "flooding"--the point at which you get so tired or frustrated that your mind becomes deluged (and deluded) by anger. A surefire indication that flooding is imminent is when you start using the words "always" or "never" in your argument. The Gottmans call this "Going Universal" (as in: "You always let me down like this!" or "I can never count on you!"). Such language absolutely murders any chance of fair or intelligent discourse. Once you have Flooded, once you have Gone Universal on somebody's ass, all hell breaks loose. It's really best not to let that happen. As an old friend of mine once told me, you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

  So I didn't speak, and Felipe didn't speak, and this heated silence went on for a long time until he finally reached for my hand and said, in an exhausted voice, "Let's be careful right now, okay?"

  I slackened, knowing exactly what he meant. This was an old code of ours. It had come up for the first time on a road trip we'd taken once from Tennessee to Arizona early on in our relationship. I'd been teaching writing at the University of Tennessee, and we were living in that strange hotel room in Knoxville, and Felipe had found a gemstone show that he'd wanted to attend in Tucson. So we'd spontaneously driven out there together, trying to make the distance in one long push. It had been a fun trip for the most part. We had sung, and talked, and laughed. But you can only sing and talk and laugh so much, and there came a moment--about thirty hours into the drive--when both of us reached a point of utter exhaustion. We were running out of gas, literally and figuratively. There were no hotels around and we were hungry and weary. I seem to remember a stark difference of opinion between us about when and where we should stop next. We were still speaking in perfectly civil tones, but tension had begun to encircle the car like a light mist.

  "Let's be careful," Felipe had said then, out of the blue.

  "Of what?" I'd asked.

  "Let's just be careful of what we say to each other for the next few hours," he'd gone on. "These are the times, when people get tired like this, that fights can happen. Let's just choose our words very carefully until we find a place to rest."

  Nothing had happened yet, but Felipe was floating the idea that there are, perhaps, moments when a couple must practice preemptive conflict resolution, arresting an argument before it can even begin. So this had become a code phrase of ours, a signpost to mind the gap and beware of falling rocks. It was a tool that we pulled out every now and again in particularly tense moments. It had always worked well for us in the past. Then again, in the past we had never gone through anything quite so tense as this indeterminate period of exile in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, maybe the tension of travel only meant that we needed the yellow flag now more than ever.

  I always remember a story my friends Julie and Dennis told me about a horrible fight they'd had on a trip to Africa together, early in their marriage. Whatever the original dispute may have been, they can't even remember to this day, but here's how it ended up: One afternoon in Nairobi, the two of them became so enraged at each other that they had to walk on opposite sides of the street toward their mutual destination because they could no longer physically tolerate each other's proximity. After a long while of this ridiculous parallel marching along, with four defensive lanes of Nairobian traffic between them, Dennis finally stopped. He opened his arms and motioned for Julie to cross the street and join him. It seemed to be a gesture of conciliation, so she conceded. She walked over to her husband, softening along the way, fully expecting to receive something like an apology. Instead, once she got within speaking distance, Dennis leaned forward and gently said, "Hey, Jules? Go fuck yourself."

  In response, she stomped off to the airport and immediately tried to sell her husband's plane ticket back home to a perfect stranger.

  They worked it out in the end, happily. Decades later, this makes for an amusing dinner-party anecdote, but it's a cautionary tale, too: You kind of don't want to let things get to that point. So I gave Felipe's hand a small squeeze and said, "Quando casar passa," which is a sweet Brazilian expression meaning "When you get married, this will pass." This is a phrase Felipe's mother used to say to him as a child whenever he fell down and scraped his knee. It's a small, silly, maternal murmur of comfort. Felipe and I had been saying this phrase to each other a lot lately. In our case, it was largely true: When we finally got married, a lot of these troubles would pass.

  He put his arm around me and pulled me close. I relaxed into his chest. Or as much as I possibly could relax, given the slamming momentum of the bus.

  He was a good man, in the end.

  He was basically a good man anyhow.

  No, he was good. He is good.

  "What should we do in the meanwhile?" he asked.

  Prior to this conversation, my instinct had been to keep us moving at a fast clip from one new place to another with the hope that fresh vistas would distract us from our legal troubles. This sort of strategy had always worked for me in the past anyhow. Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep only in a moving car, I have always been comforted by the tempo of travel. I'd always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle, since he is the most widely traveled person I've ever met. But he didn't seem to be enjoying any of this drifting.

  For one thing--though I often forget it--the man is seventeen years older than I am. So we must excuse him if he was feeling moderately less excited than I was about the notion of living out of a small backpack for an indeterminate period of time, carrying only one change of clothing and sleeping in eighteen-dollar hotel rooms. It was clearly taking a toll on him. Also, he'd already seen the world. He'd already seen great huge swaths of the damn thing and had been traveling through Asia on third-class trains back when I was in the second grade. Why was I making him do it again?

  What's more, the last few months had brought to my attention an important incompatibility between us--one that I'd never noticed before. For a pair of lifelong travelers, Felipe and I actually travel very differently. The reality about Felipe, as I was gradually realizing, is that he's both the best traveler I've ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds--all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume the man is not fit to be a traveler at all. But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe's traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he's capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

  This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local. It had taken Felipe less than a week of living with me in Knoxville, for instance, to locate his favorite breakfast cafe, his favorite bartender, and his favorite place for lunch. ("Darling!" he'd said one day, terribly excited after a solo foray into downtown Knoxville. "Did you know that they have the m
ost wonderful and inexpensive fish restaurant here called John Long Slivers?") He would've happily stayed in Knoxville indefinitely if I'd wanted us to. He had no trouble with the idea of living in that hotel room for many years to come--as long as we could just stay in one place.

  All of which reminds me of a story that Felipe told me once about his childhood. When he was a small boy in Brazil, he used to get scared sometimes in the middle of the night by some nightmare or imagined monster, and each time he would scamper across the room and climb into the bed of his wonderful sister Lily--who was ten years older, and therefore embodied all human wisdom and security. He would tap on Lily's shoulder and whisper, "Me da um cantinho"--"Give me a little corner." Sleepily, never protesting, she would move over and open up a warm spot on the bed for him. It wasn't much to ask for; just one little warm corner. For all the years that I have known this man, I have never heard him ask for much more than that.

  I'm not like that, though.

  Whereas Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can't. I'm much more restless than he is. My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet--that's not a problem. The problem is that I just can't live anywhere on the planet. I'd realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, "Darling, let's stay here."

  "Sure," I'd said. "We can stay here for a few more days if you want."

  "No, I mean let's move here. Let's forget about me immigrating to America. It's too much trouble! This is a wonderful town. I like the feeling of it. It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago. It wouldn't take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or a shop here, rent an apartment, settle in . . ."

  In reaction, I had only blanched.

  He was serious. He would just do that. He would just up and move to northern Laos indefinitely and build a new life there. But I can't. What Felipe was proposing was travel at a level I could not reach--travel that wasn't even really travel anymore, but rather a willingness to be ingested indefinitely by an unfamiliar place. I wasn't up for it. My traveling, as I understood then for the first time, was far more dilettantish than I had ever realized. As much as I love snacking on the world, when it comes time to settle down--to really settle down--I wanted to live at home, in my own country, in my own language, near my own family, and in the company of people who think and believe the same things that I think and believe. This basically limits me to a small region of Planet Earth consisting of southern New York State, the more rural sections of central New Jersey, northwestern Connecticut, and bits of eastern Pennsylvania. Quite the scanty habitat for a bird who claims to be migratory. Felipe, on the other hand--my flying fish--has no such domestic limitations. A small bucket of water anywhere in the world will do him just fine.

  Realizing all this also helped me put Felipe's recent irritability in better perspective. He was going through all this trouble--all the uncertainty and humiliation of the American immigration process--purely on my behalf, enduring a completely invasive legal proceeding when he'd just as soon be setting up a newer and much easier life in a freshly rented little apartment in Luang Prabang. Moreover, in the meantime, he was tolerating all this jittery traveling from place to place--a process he does not remotely enjoy--because he sensed that I wanted it. Why was I putting him through this? Why would I not let the man rest, anywhere ?

  So I changed the plan.

  "Why don't we just go somewhere for a few months and stay there until you get called back to Australia for your immigration interview," I suggested. "Let's just go to Bangkok."

  "No," he said. "Not Bangkok. We'll lose our minds living in Bangkok."

  "No," I said. "We won't settle in Bangkok; we'll just head in that direction because it's a hub. Let's go to Bangkok for a week or so, stay in a nice hotel, rest up, and see if we can find a cheap plane ticket from there to Bali. Once we get back to Bali, let's see if we can rent a little house. Then we'll just stay there in Bali and wait until this whole thing blows over."

  I could see by the look on Felipe's face that the idea was working for him.

  "You would do that?" he asked.

  Suddenly I had another inspiration. "Wait--let's see if we can get your old Bali house back! Maybe we can rent it from the new owner. And then we'll just stay there, in Bali, till we get your visa back to America. How does that sound?"

  It took Felipe a moment to respond, but--honest to God--when he finally did, I thought the man might weep with relief.

  So that's what we did. We headed back to Bangkok. We found a hotel with a pool and a well-stocked bar. We called the new owner of Felipe's old house to see if it was available to rent. Marvelously, it was, at a comfortable four hundred dollars a month--a surreal but perfectly fine price to pay for a house that had once been yours. We reserved a flight back to Bali, leaving in a week's time. Instantly, Felipe was happy again. Happy and patient and kindhearted, as I had always known him to be.

  But as for me . . .

  Something nagged.

  Something pulled at me. I could see that Felipe was relaxing, sitting by the nice swimming pool with a detective novel in one hand and a beer in the other, but now I was the agitated one. I am never going to be the person who wants to sit by a hotel pool with a cold beer and a detective novel. My thoughts kept turning to Cambodia, which was so tantalizingly close, which was just over the border from Thailand . . . I had always wanted to see the temple ruins at Angkor Wat but had never quite made it there in my past travels. We had a week to kill, and this would be a perfect time to go. But I couldn't imagine dragging Felipe over to Cambodia with me right now. In fact, I couldn't imagine anything Felipe would want to do less than get on a plane to Cambodia to visit crumbling temple ruins in the searing heat.

  What if I went to Cambodia alone, then, just for a few days? What if I left Felipe here in Bangkok sitting happily by the pool? For the last five months, we'd spent nearly every single minute of the day in each other's company, and often in challenging surroundings. It was a miracle that our recent spat on the bus had been the only serious conflict so far. Couldn't we each benefit from a short spell of separation?

  That said, the tenuousness of our situation made me concerned about leaving him for even a few days. This was no time to be messing around. What if something happened to me while I was in Cambodia? What if something happened to him? What if there was an earthquake, a tsunami, a riot, a plane crash, a bad case of food poisoning, a kidnapping? What if Felipe wandered out one day in Bangkok while I was gone and got hit by a car and suffered a serious head injury and ended up in a mysterious hospital somewhere with nobody knowing who he was, and what if I could never find him again? Our existence in the world was in critical flux right now and everything was so delicate. We'd been floating across the planet for five months in a single lifeboat, bobbing together uncertainly. Our union was our only strength for the time being. Why risk separation at such a precarious moment?

  On the other hand, maybe it was time to ease up a bit on the fanatical hovering. There was no sane reason to assume that things would not ultimately work out just fine for Felipe and me. Surely our strange period of exile would eventually pass; surely Felipe would be granted his American visa; surely we would get married; surely we would find a stable home in the United States; surely we would have many years to spend together in the future. That being the case, I should probably take a quick trip alone right now, if only to set a solid precedent for the future. Because here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia.

  Just for a few days!

  And maybe he
could use a break from me, too. Watching as Felipe and I had become more irritable with each other over the last few weeks, and now feeling so strongly that I wanted some space away from him, I started thinking about my parents' garden--which is as good a metaphor as any for how two married people must learn to adapt to each other and to sometimes simply clear out of each other's path in order to avoid conflict.

  My mother was originally the family gardener, but my father has become more interested in home agriculture over the years, maneuvering his way deep into this realm of hers. But just as Felipe and I travel differently, my mother and father garden differently, and often this has led to strife. Over the years, then, they have divided their garden in order to keep some civility out there amid the vegetables. In fact, they have divided the garden in such a complicated manner that, by this point in its history, you would practically need a United Nations peacekeeping force to understand my parents' carefully partitioned spheres of horticultural influence. The lettuce, broccoli, herbs, beets, and raspberries are all still under my mother's domain, for instance, because my father has not yet figured out a way to wrest control of that produce from her. But the carrots, leeks, and asparagus are completely my father's province. And as for the blueberries? Dad chases Mom out of his blueberry patch as though she were a foraging bird. My mother is not allowed anywhere near the blueberries: not to trim them, not to harvest them, not even to water them. My father has laid claim to the blueberry patch, and he defends it.