Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

CanCan, 14 January 2010,
Categories: Reviews
Tags: books, review

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage is the sequel to Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling novel Eat, Pray, Love.

At the end of her # 1 New York Times bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, author Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love in the very best way - unexpectedly - with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship, who had been living in Indonesia for quite a long while. When trying to re-enter the US together, the Department of Homeland Security had different plans for the two and ultimately, the only way for Felipe to come back to the U.S. would be with a wedding ring on his finger.

Having been effectively “sentenced to wed”, Gilbert decided to tackle her fears of matrimony by researching and interviewing women of varying cultural backgrounds. Over the next ten months, as she and Felipe wandered haphazardly across Southeast Asia, waiting for the U.S. government to permit them to return to America and get married, the only thing she talked about, read about, or thought about was this perplexing subject.

I am one of 14 people on Earth who have not read Eat, Pray, Love, so no comparisons there.

I find the subject of love and marriage very interesting as it applies in different cultures and contexts. In America we typically marry for love, but it isn’t actually like that everywhere.

I have seen a much more practical considerations about choosing a spouse: social position, financial status, life goals, age, stage in life, and many others.

I was shocked eight years ago when my Lao language tutor, a beautiful girl in her early twenties, told me that as a teenager, she thought of marrying for love, but now that she was “older”, she liked the idea of finding an older man who could take care of her. I had never heard a real live person verbalize something like that to me.

I also listened to an Australian woman volunteering in Laos explain day after day to curious Lao people about why she didn’t need a piece of paper to prove her love and loyalty to her boyfriend. She would say things like, “In my culture, I don’t NEED to get married.”

By the end of the year, she has proposed to her boyfriend, Lao convention having won out over her strange brand of women’s lib.

In Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, Elizabeth spends time traveling in Asia and being enlightened about the subject of marriage in different cultures. The women in the Hmong minority tribe in Southeast Asia don’t view marriage as a solution to any problems. While not romantic, maybe this opinion is wise!

I love reading anthropological-type accounts (no matter how unscientific) and I enjoy memoirs. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage has received mixed reviews from Eat, Pray, Love fans, but I think it is a worthy book of judged on it’s own.

I received an advance reader’s copy of Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage for the purpose of this review.

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