16 Quotes From The Author Of Eat Pray Love You Need To Read Before Getting Married
Relationships
are so important in our lives. Many studies have proven the big effect our
relationships might have on our lives. The happier and balanced your
relationship is, the happier life you're likely to lead. Needless to say, when
it comes to getting married, it's so crucial to choose well at what age you
should marry, and most importantly whom to marry. Though no one can give you
the right answers when it comes to relationships, still, it helps to read
further about the subject, especially when you're about to tie the knot. Below
are some quotes by the author of Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert you'll need to
read before getting married.
#1-
“Like anyone who
has ever walked through the valley of the shadow of divorce, Felipe and I had
each learned firsthand this distressing truth: that every intimacy carries,
secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the evercoiled makings of
complete catastrophe. We had also learned that marriage is an estate that is
very much easier to enter than it is to exit. Unfenced by law, the unmarried
lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you--the legally married
person who wants to escape doomed love--may soon discover that a significant
portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State, and that it sometimes
takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave. Thus, you can
feasibly find yourself trapped for months or even years in a loveless legal
bond that has come to feel rather like a burning building. A burning building
in which you, my friend, are handcuffed to a radiator somewhere down in the
basement, unable to wrench yourself free, while the smoke billows forth and the
rafters are collapsing.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#2-
“In the modern
industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to
marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality.
Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your
emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more
intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells
us, to a large extent, who you are. So if you ask any typical modern Western
woman how she met her husband, when she met her husband, and why she fell in
love with her husband, you can be plenty sure that you will be told a complete,
complex, and deeply personal narrative which that woman has not only spun
carefully around the entire experience, but which she has memorized,
internalized, and scrutinized for clues as to her own selfhood. Moreover, she
will more than likely share this story with you quite openly--even if you are a
perfect stranger. In fact, I have found over the years that the question
"How did you meet your husband?" is one of the best conversational
icebreakers ever invented. In my experience, it doesn't even matter whether that
woman's marriage has been happy or a disaster: It will still be relayed to you
as a vitally important story about her emotional being--perhaps even the most
vitally important story about her emotional being.
Whoever that
modern Western woman is, I can promise you that her story will concern two
people--herself and her spouse--who, like characters in a novel or movie, are
presumed to have been on some kind of personal life's journeys before meeting
each other, and whose journeys then intersected at a fateful moment. (For
instance: "I was living in San Francisco that summer, and I had no
intention of staying much longer--until I met Jim at that party.") The
story will probably have drama and suspense ("He thought I was dating the
guy I was there with, but that was just my gay friend Larry!"). The story
will have doubts ("He wasn't really my type; I normally go for guys who
are more intellectual"). Critically, the story will end either with
salvation ("Now I can't imagine my life without him!"), or--if things
have turned sour--with recriminating second-guesses ("Why didn't I admit
to myself right away that he was an alcoholic and a liar?").
Whatever the
details, you can be certain that the modern Western woman's love story will
have been examined by her from every possible angle, and that, over the years,
her narrative will have been either hammered into a golden epic myth or
embalmed into a bitter cautionary tale.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#3-
“Believe me, modern
Western marriage has much to recommend it over traditional Hmong marriage
(starting with its kidnapping-free spirit), and I will say it again: I would
not trade lives with those women. They will never know my range of freedom;
they will never have my education; they will never have my health and
prosperity; they will never be allowed to explore so many aspects of their own
natures. But there is one critical gift that a traditional Hmong bride almost
always receives on her wedding day which all too often eludes the modern
Western bride, and that is the gift of certainty. When you have only one path
set before you, you can generally feel confident that it was the correct path
to have taken. And a bride whose expectations for happiness are kept necessarily
low to begin with is more protected, perhaps, from the risk of devastating
disappointments down the road.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#4-
“We Americans
often say that marriage is "hard work." I'm not sure the Hmong would
understand this notion. Life is hard work, of course, and work is very hard
work--I'm quite certain they would agree with those statements--but how does
marriage become hard work? Here's how: Marriage becomes hard work once you have
poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of
one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work. A recent survey of young
American women found that what women are seeking these days in a husband--more
than anything else--is a man who will "inspire" them, which is, by
any measure, a tall order. As a point of comparison, young women of the same
age, surveyed back in the 1920s, were more likely to choose a partner based on
qualities such as "decency," or "honesty," or his ability
to provide for a family. But that's not enough anymore. Now we want to be
inspired by our spouses! Daily!”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#5-
“You cannot stop
the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may
sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to
fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for
the most predictable of calamities.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#6-
“As soon as you
want somebody--really want him--it is as though you have taken a surgical needle
and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation
will now cause you a lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain
the object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All
you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such primal urgency, you no longer
completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own
yearnings.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#7-
“The problem
with infatuation, of course, is that it's a mirage, a trick of the eye--indeed,
a trick of the endocrine system. Infatuation is not quite the same thing as
love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money
and can't hold down a job. When you become infatuated with somebody, you're not
really looking at that person; you're just captivated by your own reflection,
intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual
stranger. We tend, in such a state, to decide all sorts of spectacular things
about our lovers that may or may not be true. We perceive something almost
divine in our beloved, even if our friends and family might not get it. One
man's Venus is another man's bimbo, after all, and somebody else might easily
consider your personal Adonis to be a flat-out boring little loser.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#8-
“To get anywhere
close to unraveling this subject--women and marriage--we have to start with the
cold, ugly fact that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits
men. I did not invent this fact, and I don't like saying it, but it's a sad
truth, backed up by study after study. By contrast, marriage as an institution
has always been terrifically beneficial for men. If you are a man, say the
actuarial charts, the smartest decision you can possibly make for
yourself--assuming that you would like to lead a long, happy, healthy,
prosperous existence--is to get married. Married men perform dazzlingly better
in life than single men. Married men live longer than single men; married men
accumulate more wealth than single men; married men excel at their careers
above single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than
single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men;
and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression
than do single men.
"A system
could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness
than marriage," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1813, but he was dead wrong,
or at least with regard to male human happiness. There doesn't seem to be
anything, statistically speaking, that a man does not gain by getting married.
Dishearteningly,
the reverse is not true. Modern married women do not fare better in life than
their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than
single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women
(you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women
do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are
significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to
suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to
die a violent death than single women-usually at the hands of a husband, which
raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person
in the average woman's life is her own man.
All this adds up
to what puzzled sociologists call the "Marriage Benefit Imbalance"--a
tidy name for an almost freakishly doleful conclusion: that women generally
lose in the exchange of marriage vows, while men win big.
Now before we
all lie down under our desks and weep--which is what this conclusion makes me
want to do--I must assure everyone that the situation is getting better. As the
years go by and more women become autonomous, the Marriage Benefit Imbalance
diminishes, and there are some factors that can narrow this inequity
considerably. The more education a married woman has, the more money she earns,
the later in life she marries, the fewer children she bears, and the more help
her husband offers with household chores, the better her quality of life in
marriage will be. If there was ever a good moment in Western history, then, for
a woman to become a wife, this would probably be it. If you are advising your
daughter on her future, and you want her to be a happy adult someday, then you
might want to encourage her to finish her schooling, delay marriage for as long
as possible, earn her own living, limit the number of children she has, and
find a man who doesn't mind cleaning the bathtub. Then your daughter may have a
chance at leading a life that is nearly as healthy and wealthy and happy as her
future husband's life will be.
Nearly. Because
even though the gap has narrowed, the Marriage Benefit Imbalance persists.
Given that this is the case, we must pause here for a moment to consider the
mystifying question of why--when marriage has been shown again and again to be
disproportionately disadvantageous to them--so many women still long for it so
deeply. You could argue that maybe women just haven't read the statistics, but
I don't think the question is that simple. There's something else going on here
about women and marriage--something deeper, something more emotional, something
that a mere public service campaign (DO NOT GET MARRIED UNTIL YOU ARE AT LEAST
THIRTY YEARS OLD AND ECONOMICALLY SOLVENT!!!) is unlikely to change or to
shape.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#9-
“First comes
love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage? Even the very
word "matrimony" comes to us from the Latin word for mother. We don't
call marriage "patrimony." Matrimony carries an intrinsic assumption
of motherhood, as though it is the babies themselves who make the marriage.
Actually, often it is the babies themselves who make the marriage: Not only
have many couples throughout history been forced into marriage thanks to an
unplanned pregnancy, but sometimes couples waited until a successful pregnancy
occurred before sealing the deal with matrimony in order to ensure that
fertility would not later be a problem. How else could you find out whether
your prospective bride or groom was a productive breeder except by giving the
engine a test run? This was often the case in early American colonial society,
in which--as the historian Nancy Cott has discovered--many small communities
considered pregnancy to be a stigma-free, socially accepted signal that it was
now time for a young couple to tie the knot.
But with
modernity and the easy availability of birth control, the whole issue of
procreation has become more nuanced and tricky. Now the equation is no longer
"babies beget matrimony," or even necessarily "matrimony begets
babies"; instead, these days it all comes down to three critical
questions: when, how, and whether. Should you and your spouse happen to
disagree on any of these questions, married life can become extremely
complicated, because often our feelings about these three questions can be
nonnegotiable.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#10-
“Moreover, while
the vague idea of motherhood had always seemed natural to me, the reality--as
it approached--only filled me with dread and sorrow. As I got older, I
discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to
have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my
friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#11-
“The poet Jack
Gilbert (no relation, sadly for me) wrote that marriage is what happens
"between the memorable." He said that we often look back on our
marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall
are "the vacations, and emergencies"--the high points and low points.
The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very
blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those
two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand
indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do
you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody--so utterly well
known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity,
like air?”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#12-
“Marriage is a
harness of civilization, linking a man to a set of obligations and thereby
containing his restless energies. Traditional societies have long recognized
that nothing is more useless to a community than a whole bunch of single,
childless young men (aside from their admittedly useful role as cannon fodder,
of course). For the most part, single young men have a global reputation for
squandering their money on whores and drinking and games and laziness: They
contribute nothing. You need to contain such beasts, to bind them into
accountability--or so the argument has always gone. You need to convince these
young men to put aside their childish things and take up the mantle of
adult-hood, to build homes and businesses and to cultivate an interest in their
surroundings. It's an ancient truism across countless different cultures that
there is no better accountability forging tool for an irresponsible young man
than a good, solid wife.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#13-
“I forget
sometimes. I have to say this, because I think it's such an important point
when it comes to marriage: I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain
men--for certain people--to be able to provide their loved ones with material
comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men
can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much
that matters to men, what it represents.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#14-
“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.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#15-
“The Polish
philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written exquisitely about this
subject. He believes that modern couples have been sold a bill of goods when
they're told that they can and should have it both ways--that we should all
have equal parts intimacy and autonomy in our lives. Somehow, Bauman suggests,
we have mistakenly come to believe in our culture that if only we manage our
emotional lives correctly we should each be able to experience all the
reassuring constancy of marriage without ever once feeling remotely confined or
limited. The magic word here--the almost fetishized word here--is
"balance," and just about everybody I know these days seems to be
seeking that balance with a near-desperate urgency. We are all trying, as
Bauman writes, to force our marriages to "empower without disempowering,
enable without disabling, fulfill without burdening."
But perhaps this
is an unrealistic aspiration?
Because love
limits, almost by definition. Love narrows. The great expansion we feel in our
hearts when we fall in love is matched only by the great restrictions that will
necessarily follow.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
#16-
“First spouses,
I have learned, don't ever really go away--even if you aren't speaking to them
anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories,
never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they
please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism.
"We know you better than you know yourselves" is what the ghosts of
our ex-spouses like to remind us, and what they know about us, unfortunately,
is often not pretty.
"There are
four minds in the bed of a divorced man who marries a divorced woman,"
says a fourth-century Talmudic document--and indeed, our former spouses do
often haunt our beds. I still dream about my ex-husband, for instance, far more
than I would ever have imagined back when I left him.
Usually these
dreams are agitating and confusing. On rare occasions, they are warm or
conciliatory. It doesn't really matter, though: I can neither control the
dreams nor stop them. He shows up in my subconscious whenever he pleases,
entering without knocking. He still has the keys to that house.”
- Committed - ELIZABETH GILBERT
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The book: Committed- ELIZABETH GILBERT
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