Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Truth be told, it seemed mostly irritating to people--even to people who loved us--that Felipe and I were walking around wearing wedding rings without having had an official and legal marriage ceremony. The consensus was that our actions were confusing at best, pathetic at worst. "No!" declared my old friend Brian in an e-mail from North Carolina when I told him that Felipe and I had recently exchanged private vows. "No, you cannot just do it that way!" he insisted. "That's not enough! You must have some kind of real wedding!"

  Brian and I argued over this subject for weeks, and I was surprised to discover his adamancy on the topic. I thought that he, of all people, would understand why Felipe and I shouldn't need to marry publicly or legally just to satisfy other people's conventions. Brian is one of the happiest married men I know (his devotion to Linda makes him the living definition of the marvelous word uxorious, or "wife-worshiping"), but he's also quite possibly my most naturally nonconformist friend. He bends comfortably to no socially accepted norm whatsoever. He's basically a pagan with a Ph.D. who lives in a cabin in the woods with a composting toilet; this was hardly Miss Manners. But Brian was uncompromising in his insistence that private vows spoken only before God do not count as marriage.

  "MARRIAGE IS NOT PRAYER!" he insisted (italics and capitals his). "That's why you have to do it in front of others, even in front of your aunt who smells like cat litter. It's a paradox, but marriage actually reconciles a lot of paradoxes: freedom with commitment, strength with subordination, wisdom with utter nincompoopery, etc. And you're missing the main point--it's not just to 'satisfy' other people. Rather, you have to hold your wedding guests to their end of the deal. They have to help you with your marriage; they have to support you or Felipe, if one of you falters."

  The only person who seemed more annoyed than Brian about our private commitment ceremony was my niece Mimi, age seven. First of all, Mimi felt prodigiously ripped off that I hadn't thrown a real wedding, because she really wanted to be a flower girl at least once in her life and had never yet been given the chance. Meanwhile, her best friend and rival Moriya had already been a flower girl twice--and Mimi wasn't getting any younger here, people.

  Moreover, our actions in Tennessee offended my niece on an almost semantic level. It had been suggested to Mimi that she could now, after that exchange of private vows in Knoxville, refer to Felipe as her uncle--but she wasn't having it. Nor did her older brother Nick buy it. It wasn't that my sister's kids didn't like Felipe. It's just that an uncle, as Nick (age ten) instructed me sternly, is either the brother of your father or mother, or he is the man who is legally married to your aunt. Felipe, therefore, was not officially Nick and Mimi's uncle any more than he was officially my husband, and there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise. Children at that age are nothing if not sticklers for convention. Hell, they're practically census takers. To punish me for my civil disobedience, Mimi took to calling Felipe her "uncle" using the sarcastic air quotes every time. Sometimes she even referred to him as my "husband"--again with the air quotes and the hint of irritated disdain.

  One night back in 2005, when Felipe and I were having dinner at Catherine's house, I had asked Mimi what it would take for her to consider my commitment to Felipe a valid one. She was unyielding in her certainty. "You need to have a real wedding," she said.

  "But what makes something a real wedding?" I asked.

  "You need to have a person there." Now she was frankly exasperated. "You can't just make promises with nobody seeing it. There has to be a person who watches when you make promises."

  Curiously enough, Mimi was making a strong intellectual and historical point there. As the philosopher David Hume explained, witnesses are necessary in all societies when it comes to important vows. The reason is that it's not possible to tell whether a person is telling the truth or lying when he speaks a promise. The speaker may have, as Hume called it, "a secret direction of thought" hidden behind the noble and high-flown words. The presence of the witness, though, negates any concealed intentions. It doesn't matter anymore whether you meant what you said; it matters merely that you said what you said, and that a third party witnessed you saying it. It is the witness, then, who becomes the living seal of the promise, notarizing the vow with real weight. Even in the early European Middle Ages, before the times of official church or government weddings, the expression of a vow before a single witness was all it took to seal a couple together forever in a state of legal matrimony. Even then, you couldn't do it entirely on your own. Even then, somebody had to watch.

  "Would it satisfy you," I asked Mimi, "if Felipe and I promised wedding vows to each other, right here in your kitchen, in front of you?"

  "Yeah, but who would be the person?" she asked.

  "Why don't you be the person?" I suggested. "That way you can be sure it's done properly."

  This was a brilliant plan. Making sure that things are done properly is Mimi's specialty. This is a girl who was veritably born to be the person. And I'm proud to report that she rose to the occasion. Right there in the kitchen, while her mother cooked dinner, Mimi asked Felipe and me if we would please rise and face her. She asked us to please hand her the gold "wedding" rings (again with the air quotes) that we had already been wearing for months. These rings she promised to hold safely until the ceremony was over.

  Then she improvised a matrimonial ritual, cobbled together, I supposed, from various movies she had seen in her seven long years of life.

  "Do you promise to love each other all the time?" she asked.

  We promised.

  "Do you promise to love each other through sick and not sick?"

  We promised.

  "Do you promise to love each other through mad and not mad?"

  We promised.

  "Do you promise to love each other through rich and not so rich?" (The idea of flat-out poor, apparently, was not something Mimi cared to wish upon us; thus "not so rich" would have to suffice.)

  We promised.

  We all stood there for a moment in silence. It was evident that Mimi would have liked to remain in the authoritative position of the person for a bit longer, but she couldn't come up with anything else that needed promising. So she gave us back our rings and instructed us to place them on each other's fingers.

  "You may now kiss the bride," she pronounced.

  Felipe kissed me. Catherine gave a small cheer and went back to stirring the clam sauce. Thus concluded, right there in my sister's kitchen, the second non-legally-binding commitment ceremony of Liz and Felipe. This time with an actual witness.

  I hugged Mimi. "Satisfied?"

  She nodded.

  But plainly--you could read it all over her face--she was not.

  What is it about a public, legal wedding ceremony that means so much to everybody anyhow? And why was I so stubbornly--almost belligerently--resistant to it? My aversion made even less sense, considering that I happen to be somebody who loves ritual and ceremony to an inordinate degree. Look, I've studied my Joseph Campbell, I've read The Golden Bough, and I get it. I thoroughly recognize that ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change, much the same way that a stable boy can lead a blindfolded horse right through the center of a fire, whispering, "Don't overthink this, buddy, okay? Just put one hoof in front of the other and you'll come out on the other side just fine."

  I even understand why people feel it's so important to witness each other's ritualistic ceremonies. My father--not an especially conventional man by any means--was always adamant that we must attend the wakes and funerals of anyone in our hometown who ever died. The point, he explained, was not necessarily to honor the dead or to comfort the living. Instead, you went to these ceremoni
es so that you could be seen--specifically seen, for instance, by the wife of the deceased. You needed to make sure that she catalogued your face and registered the fact that you had attended her husband's funeral. This was not so you could earn social points or get extra credit for being a nice person, but rather so that the next time you ran into the widow at the supermarket she would be spared the awful uncertainty of wondering whether you had heard her sad news. Having seen you at her husband's funeral, she would already know that you knew. She would therefore not have to repeat the story of her loss to you all over again, and you would be saved the awkward necessity of expressing your condolences right there in the middle of the produce aisle because you had already expressed them at the church, where such words are appropriate. This public ceremony of death, therefore, somehow squared you and the widow with each other--and also somehow spared the two of you social discomfort and uncertainty. Your business with each other was settled. You were safe.

  This is what my friends and family wanted, I realized, when they were asking for a public wedding ceremony between Felipe and me. It wasn't that they wanted to dress in fine clothing, dance in uncomfortable shoes, or dine on the chicken or the fish. What my friends and family really wanted was to be able to move on with their lives knowing with certainty where everybody stood in relationship to everybody else. This was what Mimi wanted--to be squared and spared. She wanted the clear assurance that she could now take the words "uncle" and "husband" out of air quotes and continue her life without awkwardly wondering whether she was now required to honor Felipe as a family member or not. And it was quite clear that the only way she was ever going to offer up her full loyalty to this union was if she could personally witness the exchange of legal vows.

  I knew all this, and I understood it. Still, I resisted. The main problem was that--even after several months spent reading about marriage and thinking about marriage and talking about marriage--I was still not yet entirely convinced about marriage. I was not yet sure that I bought the package of goods that matrimony was selling. Truthfully, I was still feeling resentful that Felipe and I had to marry at all merely because the government demanded it of us. And probably the reason this all bothered me so deeply and at such a fundamental level, I finally realized, is that I am Greek.

  Please understand, I do not mean that I am literally Greek, as in: from the country of Greece, or a member of a collegiate fraternity, or enamored of the sexual passion that bonds two men in love. Instead, I mean that I am Greek in the way I think. Because here's the thing: It has long been understood by philosophers that the entire bedrock of Western culture is based on two rival worldviews--the Greek and the Hebrew--and whichever side you embrace more strongly determines to a large extent how you see life.

  From the Greeks--specifically from the glory days of ancient Athens--we have inherited our ideas about secular humanism and the sanctity of the individual. The Greeks gave us all our notions about democracy and equality and personal liberty and scientific reason and intellectual freedom and open-mindedness and what we might call today "multiculturalism." The Greek take on life, therefore, is urban, sophisticated, and exploratory, always leaving plenty of room for doubt and debate.

  On the other hand, there is the Hebrew way of seeing the world. When I say "Hebrew" here, I'm not specifically referring to the tenets of Judaism. (In fact, most of the contemporary American Jews I know are very Greek in their thinking, while it's the American fundamentalist Christians these days who are profoundly Hebrew.) "Hebrew," in the sense that philosophers use it here, is shorthand for an ancient worldview that is all about tribalism, faith, obedience, and respect. The Hebrew credo is clannish, patriarchal, authoritarian, moralistic, ritualistic, and instinctively suspicious of outsiders. Hebrew thinkers see the world as a clear play between good and evil, with God always firmly on "our" side. Human actions are either right or wrong. There is no gray area. The collective is more important than the individual, morality is more important than happiness, and vows are inviolable.

  The problem is that modern Western culture has somehow inherited both these ancient worldviews--though we have never entirely reconciled them because they aren't reconcilable. (Have you followed an American election cycle recently?) American society is therefore a funny amalgam of both Greek and Hebrew thinking. Our legal code is mostly Greek; our moral code is mostly Hebrew. We have no way of thinking about independence and intellect and the sanctity of the individual that is not Greek. We have no way of thinking about righteousness and God's will that is not Hebrew. Our sense of fairness is Greek; our sense of justice is Hebrew.

  And when it comes to our ideas about love--well, we are a tangled mess of both. In survey after survey, Americans express their belief in two completely contradictory ideas about marriage. On one hand (the Hebrew hand), we overwhelmingly believe as a nation that marriage should be a lifetime vow, never broken. On the other, Greek, hand, we equally believe that an individual should always have the right to get divorced, for his or her own personal reasons.

  How can both these ideas be simultaneously true? No wonder we're so confused. No wonder Americans get married more often, and get divorced more often, than any other people in any other nation on earth. We keep ping-ponging back and forth between two rival views of love. Our Hebrew (or biblical/moral) view of love is based on devotion to God--which is all about submission before a sacrosanct creed, and we absolutely believe in that. Our Greek (or philosophical/ethical) view of love is based on devotion to nature--which is all about exploration, beauty, and a deep reverence for self-expression. And we absolutely believe in that, too.

  The perfect Greek lover is erotic; the perfect Hebrew lover is faithful.

  Passion is Greek; fidelity is Hebrew.

  This idea came to haunt me because, on the Greek-Hebrew spectrum, I fall much closer to the Greek end. Did this make me an especially poor candidate for matrimony? I worried that it did. We Greeks don't feel comfortable sacrificing the Self upon the altar of tradition; it just feels oppressive and scary to us. I worried about all this even more after I stumbled on one tiny but critical piece of information from that massive Rutgers study on matrimony. Apparently the researchers found evidence to support the notion that marriages in which both husband and wife wholeheartedly respect the sanctity of matrimony itself are more likely to endure than marriages where couples are perhaps a bit more suspicious of the institution. It seems, then, that respecting marriage is a precondition for staying married.

  Though I suppose that makes sense, right? You need to believe in what you're pledging, don't you, for a promise to have any weight? Because marriage is not merely a vow made to another individual; that's the easy part. Marriage is also a vow made to a vow. I know for certain that there are people who stay married forever not necessarily because they love their spouses, but because they love their principles. They will go to their graves still bound in loyal matrimony to somebody they may actively loathe just because they promised something before God to that person, and they would no longer recognize themselves if they dishonored such a promise.

  Clearly, I am not such a being. In the past, I was given the clear choice between honoring my vow and honoring my own life, and I chose myself over the promise. I refuse to say that this necessarily makes me an unethical person (one could argue that choosing liberation over misery is a way of honoring life's miracle), but it did bring up a dilemma when it came to getting married to Felipe. While I was just Hebrew enough to dearly wish that I would stay married forever this time (yes, let's just go ahead and use those shaming words: this time), I had not yet found a way to respect wholeheartedly the institution of matrimony itself. I had not yet found a place for myself within the history of marriage where I felt that I belonged, where I felt that I could recognize myself. This absence of respect and self-recognition caused me to fear that not even I would believe my own sworn vows on my own wedding day.

  Trying to sort this out, I brought up the question with Felipe. Now I should say he
re that Felipe was considerably more relaxed about all this than I was. While he didn't hold any more affection for the institution of marriage than I did, he kept telling me, "At this point, darling, it's all just a game. The government has set the rules and now we have to play their game in order to get what we want. Personally, I'm willing to play any game whatsoever, as long as it means that I ultimately can live my life with you in peace."

  That mode of thinking worked for him, but gamesmanship wasn't what I was looking for here; I needed a certain level of earnestness and authenticity. Still, Felipe could see my agitation on this subject, and--God bless the man--he was kind enough to listen to me muse for quite a long while on the rival philosophies of Western civilization and how they were affecting my views on matrimony. But when I asked Felipe whether he felt himself to be more Greek or more Hebrew in his thinking, he replied, "Darling--none of this really applies to me."

  "Why not?" I asked.

  "I'm not Greek or Hebrew."

  "What are you then?"

  "I'm Brazilian."

  "But what does that even mean?"

  Felipe laughed. "Nobody knows! That's the wonderful thing about being Brazilian. It doesn't mean anything! So you can use your Brazilianness as an excuse to live your life any way you want. It's a brilliant strategy, actually. It's taken me far."

  "So how does that help me?"

  "Perhaps it can help you to relax! You're about to marry a Brazilian. Why don't you start thinking like a Brazilian?"

  "How?"

  "By choosing what you want! That's the Brazilian way, isn't it? We borrow everyone's ideas, mix it all up, and then we create something new out of it. Listen--what is it that you like so much about the Greeks?"

  "Their sense of humanity," I said.

  "And what is it that you like--if anything--about the Hebrews?"

  "Their sense of honor," I said.

  "Okay, so that's settled--we'll take them both. Humanity and honor. We'll make a marriage out of that combination. We'll call it a Brazilian blend. We'll shape this thing to our own code."