I’m reading at the moment a book about marriage, borrowed from a friend. Among the many existential questions I have or that bothers me to my core, there are some related to marriage. I remember perfectly a day from my teenage years when my mom told me: all marriages seem perfect from the outside, but there is no certainty that after marriage your house will be ever completely peaceful again, all quarrels start when you don’t even think about it, most of them because of different opinions in raising children or how to deal with money. There is also the option of arguing who’s washing the dishes, or who’s taking the trash outside 🙂 I don’t think there is a perfect couple, who never quarrel and who live in complete and absolute bliss and happiness! As long as there are two people involved in a relationship, there are two different characters and it is basically impossible not to have small differences. The book I read is Committed. A love story by Elisabeth Gilbert. This is a follow-up of the book Eat, Pray, Love and it is the love story between Liz and Felipe. The two had failed marriages that ended up in divorce and were firmly convinced that they would never say yes to another marriage again. However, the American authorities forced them to get married, and they, in order to change their beliefs, decided to go on a trip to Asia, researching the significance of marriage, from both a historical and religious perspective. The couple arrives in Vietnam, where they meet a family from a Hmong village. The Hmong are a very small, isolated ethnic group, called by indigenous people anthropologists, who live in the mountains of Vietnam, Thailand, Lao and China. The oldest woman in the family was about eighty years old and she seems to be the happiest of all.
“— Is your husband a good husband? I asked. The old woman had to ask her niece to repeat the question a few times, just to make sure she had heard it correctly: Is he a good husband? Then she looked at me with an amused look, as if I were asking, ‘Are these stones that make up the mountain you live on good stones?’The best answer she could find was this: her husband was neither a good husband nor a bad husband. He was just a husband. It was the same as all husbands. As she spoke of him, the word ‘husband’ seemed to refer to an occupation, perhaps even a species, to a much greater extent than to represent a particular individual, whether he was cherished or annoying. The role of husband was quite simple, involving a series of duties that her husband had obviously performed satisfactorily throughout their life together. Just like the other women’s husbands did, she added, if you weren’t unlucky enough to run into a belt. The old grandmother went so far as to tell me that, in the end, it is not so important what man a woman marries. With rare exceptions, any man is about the same as any other“
In a world as simple as the one in which this old Hmong woman lives, a marriage does not involve as many expectations as in a modern world. Probably this is why these Hmong women live happily ever after. In the words of an old saying: Whoever sows expectation, reaps disappointment. In the world we live in, the modern and industrialized world, marriage involves fulfillment on a personal level through (or ALSO through) the one we choose. With marriage we embark on a pursuit of happiness in all its splendor of romantic love, right? We forget to take into account the fact that not all people give away romance. We ask and insist, and when our requirements have not been met, we are disappointed. We live in a society that teaches us to ask. It would probably be ideal to find your happiness in your own concerns and passions and you should accept the person next to you as he is and not as you would like to change him.
The more expectations you have, the more disappointed you will be. I say this in general, not just about marriage. We all tend to ask for more and more and to be satisfied only for a short time. Before you get married, you really want to put on your finger a shiny ring that is only good to present and detail at the coffee the next day with your girlfriends. After you get married, you start longing for the days when you didn’t have to explain to anyone. Either way, we’re still not happy.
I think that life is structured in such a way that you should not live alone, although no one has said that living together is simple. On the contrary, it is complicated, sometimes sprinkled here and there with compromises and effort on both sides to make a marriage go on the right path. But the devil isn’t so black, is he? 🙂
Committed. A love story quotes:
“People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of it.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.”
“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. 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 a lacerating injury.”
“Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.”
“My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homunculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was.”
“I’d learned enough from life’s experiences to understand that destiny’s interventions can sometimes be read as an invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn’t take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.”
“every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.”