A Chicken’s Ass is the Secret to a Happy Marriage

 I”m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed – A sceptic makes peace with marriage.  She is the author of the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love where, following a devastating divorce, she takes a year off  and travels to Italy, crying over plate after plate of pasta, to India, seeking spiritual solace in an Ashram and Indonesia where she unwittingly falls in love with a Brazilian gem stone dealer.

 In Committed she explores marriage: examining her own terror of getting hitched again to Felipe the Brazlian; how it has evolved over the centuries and why so many fail spectacularly.  This is Gilbert grown up.  No more crying over bowls of pasta and navel gazing; it is a solid piece of research delving into her own psyche and the collective.

Donning her anthrolophogist hat, the book begins as a social essay charting her days spent with the Hmong in Viet Nam but although interesting you find yourself yearning for her to take off the serious Panama and put on her Aussie Outbacker with the corks dangling around the edges.  I fast forward, skip paragraphs and sometimes whole pages which reminds me of being back at school speed reading Molière.  As a researcher/essayist she gets the salient points across but it is the personal writing that Gilbert is so good at and thankfully she is soon out of the Hmong mud hut and back on dry land with Felipe writing from the  personal aspect which is far more entertaining and enlightening.  (If you have yet to discover Elizabeth Gilbert and you like this blog, go get yourself a copy…that’s me comparing myself to Elizabeth Gilbert ha ha).

So after travelling the world talking to many, many women about marriage Gilbert comes to the conclusion that the problem why so many marriages fail is one of expectation.  We, and by this I presume she means herself and those who have tried and failed to stay committed, (do I sound smug?  maybe a tad) believe that our other halves will not only help pay the bills, look after us when we are ill and put the bins out on Mondays but are also responsible for our happiness at every minute of the day.  I think she is onto something here, at least if I look around at the many around me who are divorced – not counting those who really are better off and should never have got involved with each other in the first place – I think many have blamed each other for their own failings, dissatisfactions and the downright difficulties of staying on an even keel and in happy bunny  mode through a life which is not always forgiving. 

As preparation for marriage to Felipe she lists a whole page of her own character failings and reads them out to him on the banks of the Mekong river.   (Note to reader your kitchen in Reading will do if you don’t happen to have the Mekong handy.)  At the end of a pretty honest, warts and all list which makes us want to be her best friend, she asks Felipe  in typical Gilbert style – which makes you take that wish back because she really can be too much at times -

 Do you still love me?

 To which he replies,

“I know all of this and I’ve been watching you for a very long time and I believe I can accept the whole parcel.” 

This is where you want to throw the book at her because if she doesn’t marry him I know a few thousand women who will.  That’s the thing about Gilbert and her writing, she can get a bit carried away with the me-ness and you find yourself batting for the other side on occasion.  Anyway, having wrung all the romance out of the holy matrimony of “marriage” through analysis, interviews and contemplation she starts to explore the bit that really cannot be explained away no matter what hat you are wearing at the time:  Love.  She writes of  her grandfather burying her grandmother’s ashes on the family farm and manages to convey, without once telling us, the years of love they shared and the ache in his heart since she has gone whilst  the tears gather in the rims of my reading glasses.

Of Felipe – whose faults she lists and lays out to dry in the sun for all the world to read: drinking too much wine and being hopeless with money – she writes: 

“I love this man.  I love him for countless ridiculous reasons.  I love his square, sturdy, Hobbit-like feet.  I love the way he always sings “La Vie en Rose” when he’s cooking dinner. (Needless to say I love that he cooks dinner).  I love how he speaks almost perfect English but still manages to invent marvellous words and has never quite mastered the exact wording or pacing of certain English-language idioms either.  “DONT COUNT YOUR EGGS WHILE THEY ARE STILL UP INSIDE THE CHICKEN’S ASS” is a terrific example.”

And she means that with every flaw in her being.