In the last few years, at least ten people have told me I need to read the book Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. As many of you know, Eat Pray Love is a memoir about her travels across Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of herself. There is also a movie Eat, Pray, Love starring Julia Roberts. In her second book, Committed, she shares stories, history, facts, studies, and personal experience to explore matrimony and partnership. Committed is not a sequel to Eat Pray Love, but it is the story of how she rallies after divorce and not only accepts, but comes to peace with marriage. In her case, marriage is necessary because she has to marry her new partner in order for them to be together.  This is a great read for anyone, I think women especially, and even more so those thinking, planning, or are currently married. I wanted to share some quotes from both books that I thought were especially noteworthy ( I think it goes without saying that I highly recommend both books). There is a lot of interesting and intriguing stories in both books, so I did my best to include just my favorites, but not spoil any endings! This is timely because even though I do not own a TV or cable, it seems like I have heard a lot of hoopla about the royal wedding, marriage,traditions, love, and relationships recently.

EAT, PRAY, LOVE PASSAGES 

Americans and Pleasure: “Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions on themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks, but that is not the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today..Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their office than they do in their own homes.”

Italians and Pleasure: “Il bel far niente (the beauty of doing nothing) has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated…You don’t necessarily need to be rich to experience this, either…l’arte d’arrangiarsi or the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few ingredients into a feast.”

Responsibility of a Family: “Responsibility that word worked on me until I worked on it, until I looked at it carefully and broke it down into the two words that make its true definition: the ability to respond. And what I ultimately had to respond to was the reality that every speck of my being was telling me to get out of my marriage.”

Living Your Own Life: “The Bhavagad Gita— that ancient Indian Yogic text– says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”

Women and the Sword: “Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.’ On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where ‘all is correct.’ But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, ‘All is confusing. Nothing follows a regular course.’ Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to women, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.”

Soul Mates: “People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too Painful.”

Letting Go: She confides in her friend, Richard that she is missing her ex, David- she tells him I love him, I miss him, etc. His response: “So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, and then you drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of David because then you’ll really be alone, and Liz Gilbert is scared to death of what will happen if she’s really alone…If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess about this guy, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot– a doorway. And guess what that universe will do with that doorway? It will rush in– God will rush in– and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using David to block that door. Let it go…You’re wishing too much baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”

Relationships and Control: More advice from Richard “You’re a powerful woman and you’re used to getting what you want out of life, and you didn’t get what you wanted in your last few relationships and it’s got you all jammed up. Your husband didn’t behave the way you wanted him to and David didn’t either. Life didn’t go your way for once. And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin’ her way.”

Essence of time: “Over the years, my hypersensitive awareness of time’s speed let me to push myself to experience life at a maximum pace. If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible to experience it now. Hence all the traveling, all the romances, all the ambition, all the pasta.”

The Pursuit of Life: “Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time– when pursued like a bandit– will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you’re banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won’t. You have to admit that you can’t catch it. That you aren’t supposed to catch it. At some point, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.”

Controlling the Mind: “On first glance, this seems a nearly impossible task. Control your thoughts? Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring…Instead of admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then– with great forgiveness and fortitude– dismissing them…You can use the shrink’s office to understand why you have these destructive thoughts in the first place; you can use spiritual exercises to help overcome them. It’s a sacrifice to let them go, of course. It’s a loss of old habits, comforting old grudges and familiar vignettes…This all takes practice and effort, it’s not a teaching you can hear once and then expect to master immediately.”

Rituals and Emotion: “This is what spirituality is for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.”

Happiness: “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.” 

COMMITTED PASSAGES


History of marriage in America; Paul Popenoe from CA in the 1930′s: “Popenoe was concerned that white women– who had lately started attending college and delaying marriage– weren’t breeding quickly or copiously enough, while all the wrong-colored people were breeding in dangerous numbers. He also nursed deep concerns about marriage and breeding among the “unfit,” and so his clinic’s first priority was to sterilize all of those whom Popenoe judged unworthy to reproduce (over 60,000).” Popenoe also started the first marriage-counseling center in order to keep white protestant couples together and started the Ladies Home Journal column “Can This Marriage be Saved?” to help keep white couples together.

Love and Relationships: “If you honestly want to have a society in which people choose their own partners on the basis of personal affection, you must prepare yourself for the inevitable. There will be broken hearts and broken lives. Exactly because the human heart is such a mystery…love renders all of our plans and all our intentions a big gamble.”

Statistics Based off Studies: “The less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce… The more tightly woven a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be… Marriages based on a  traditional, restrictive sense about a woman’s place in home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female household chores…Women with college educations and careers who marry relatively late in life are the most likely female candidate to stay married…The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later…Age 25 seems to be the magic cutoff point- couples who marry before that age are exceptionally more divorce-prone than couples who wait until they are 26 or older.”

Forgiveness: “In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy.”

Current Marriage Trends: “By the year 2004, unmarried women were the fastest growing demographic in the United States. A thirty-year-old American woman was 3 times more likely to be single in 2004 than her counterpart in the 1970s. The number of households in America without children reached an all-time high in 2008.”

Women and Marriage: “The cold ugly fact is that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. From studies, married men perform dazzingly better in life, live longer, accumulate more, excel at careers, report to be happier, less likely to die from a violent death, suffer less from alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression than single man…The reverse is not true. In fact, every fact is reverse,  single women fare much better than married women. On average, married women take a 7% pay cut. All of this adds up to what Sociologists called the “Marriage Benefit Imbalance”…It is important to pause here and inspect why so women long for it (marriage) so deeply.” One example from Gilbert’s friend “wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen.” This can lead to what Gilbert describes in women as “an enormous capacity for love that has all too often been left unmatched and unreturned by the world. As such, she struggles with some very serious unfulfilled emotional yearnings and questions about her own value.”

Women and Self-Sacrifice: “Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women as to see themselves in a relationship of connection…I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein that have quietly buried in many neat rows– the personal dreams they have given up for their families…(Women) have a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept.”

Intimacy: “This is intimacy: the trading of secrets in the dark. This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.”

Love and Religion: “It has been understood by philosophers that the entire bedrock of Western culture is based on two rival worldviews the Greek and the Hebrew. 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 (philosophical/ethical) view of love is based on devotion to nature– which is all about exploration, beauty, and a deep reverence for self-expression.”