I feel a lot better about my own marriage after having read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. I haven’t read Eat, Pray, Love, so this is my introduction to Elizabeth Gilbert. I think I like her.
Gilbert had a bad divorce so was extremely gun-shy of marriage. She worked through her doubts by delving into research about the history of marriage. I love a woman who does her research! Especially when she is willing to share her findings with me! What she wonders, after all her research, is if perhaps she hasn’t been asking too much of love?
It’s such a great question. If American woman are looking for inspiration from their men rather than qualities like decency and honesty, maybe we are asking too much these days. I admit to having once wanted my husband to inspire me. We’ve been married 20 years and I never got much inspiration out of him so I’ve learned to settle for decency and honesty over the years.
I’ve got little stickies all over my book from her research on the history of marriage. I’ll try and condense what I found interesting to a few paragraphs (no guarantees, however, I found a lot of it interesting)…
Let’s start from the beginning.
While marriage was a sacred institution for the Jews, the same was not true for Christianity (or Buddhism, for that matter). Gilbert says marriage was considered better than flat-out whoring, but not by much. Married couples were viewed as unholy until around 1215, when the church realized it wasn’t going to be able to keep people from marrying. Instead, it claimed authority over marriage and imposed all kinds of rules and regulations to try and control it. In early European society, before these controls were imposed (like once married, no getting unmarried and no marriage behind the backs of the church), marriage was much more loosely controlled and divorce happened all the time. It had been a secular institution monitored by families and civil courts until the Catholic Church claimed it for its own. By being anti-divorce, the church was able to virtually eradicate females because men were allowed to venture outside of the marriage if they were unhappy, but women were not.
Gilbert says that same sex marriage is coming to America because marriage is a civil contract and religious objections cannot stop it. She points to interracial marriage as an example. Interracial marriage wasn’t allowed until 1967, and it made it’s way into existence despite the fact that 70% of Americans opposed the ruling. 7 out of 10 Americans believed it should be a civil crime for people of different races to marry each other. But, as Gilbert puts out, the courts were morally ahead of the people in this case, and eventually everyone got used to interracial marriage which didn’t cause the institution of marriage to fall apart.
However, marriage is on the decline everywhere, today. People are wary of it and I’m right there with them. I am not encouraging my kids to get married, especially not my daughter. I just don’t really think it’s that great of a thing for a woman, although maybe it’s better now than it used to be. I was raised in the conservative South where people still believe that God wants wives to be subservient to their husbands, so I may be looking at it through tainted glasses. It always amazes me that same sex couples want marriage so badly. But I suppose I do take the civil rights marriage offers me for granted. Same sex couples simply want the same rights I have been given and I can see no reason to refuse it to them. As Dolly Parton once said (and I’m paraphrasing), “I don’t understand why same sex couples shouldn’t be as miserable as the rest of us.”
According to Gilbert, the better educated a woman is, the happier her marriage will be. I had a long discussion about this with my husband because we have been trying to decide whether I am going to go back to school or back to work. I’ve been wanting to go back to school for years, but when my husband lost his job 5 years ago, that threw a lot of our plans out the window. I feel fairly certain if I go back to work teaching or doing something administrative, I’ll leave him. I can’t even imagine having given up so much of my life for the sake of the family only to have to go back to something I don’t enjoy doing. I can’t even begin to tell you how happy I am that Gilbert’s statistics back me up on this.
Gilbert also says that marriage does not benefit women as much as it does men and that this backed up by study after study. Marriage has always been quite beneficial for men. Married men live longer; do better at their careers; are less likely to die violent deaths; suffer less from alcoholism, drug abuse and depression; and they report being much happier than single men. Sadly, the opposite is true for married women. Single women live longer, do better at their careers, suffer less from addiction, and report being happier than married women. Despite this fact, I, like Gilbert’s mother, have chosen my family.
I appreciated Gilbert’s explanation about Greek thinking and Hebrew thinking clashing with one another. I’ve done a lot of research on this issue myself, and have made a great study of the Existentialists who may have been among the first to recognize the clash and what it is doing to us. We try to live with both world views, but they are completely incompatible. I disagree a bit with how she explained it. She explains the Hebrew mindset as being about tribalism, faith, obedience and respect, while the Greek mindset is about secular humanism and the sanctity of the individual. I don’t really think this is right. The Hebrews greatly valued the individual. In comparison, the Greeks were much more enamored with abstract values. G-d didn’t become an abstract noun until Greek thought grabbed hold of it. G-d, for the Hebrews was a process and each and every individual Hebrew was an essential part of this process. But no point bickering, details, I appreciate the argument. We’ve inherited both worldviews and they are completely and totally incompatible. There is no way to reconcile them. It makes us “schizophrenic” (not in the real sense but in terms of having a split personality).
Gilbert says that couples invented marriage and that marriage is subversive. There are patterns that have been repeated throughout history and in all cultures. First, the powers that be try to eliminate marriage because the strength of families often undermine their power. Once they realize they can’t eliminate marriage, they seek to control it. Once they realize they can’t control it, they co-opt the notion of marriage and will go so far as to pretend they invented it in the first place. Which, of course, is what conservative Christians are doing in America, today. They act as though they personally created family values and the institution itself when in reality, Christianity began as a serious attack on marriage and family values.
And that, ironically, makes me feel much better about my marriage. I really like the idea that it is subversive.