Commitments

A couple weeks ago I arrived way too early to the movie I was planning on seeing so I decided to go read something across the street at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Nobles. It was Liz Gilbert's Commitment. I read the first two chapters and felt a similar love hate to her earlier book Eat Love Pray. I loved Eat Love Pray, but there was an underlying narcissism that irked me. So then Commitment came out and I was curious but let's face it, I knew I was going to get page after page of sickly sweet Felipe and I are terribly flawed people with a terribly perfect love story, complete with huge romantic hurdles to overcome.

But she and I shared one thing- we both fell for foreigners, and I knew there might be a few things I could learn from her experience. Even if I refuse to pay money for her lessons they arrive at a time when I've found myself particularly introspective about such commitments. For one as a girl it's hard not to think about: as my friends planned their weddings I internally considered how I would do things differently even though when it came down to it, I had one huge strike against officially sealing the deal- it felt innately wrong for me to enjoy the privileges hetero couples have access to that gay couples don't- especially when such vitriolic hate was being spewed against lovely people who just wanted to share their life with someone they love- how is that evil? If this didn't affect someone very close to my heart, then maybe it wouldn't be so important to me, but it does. Either way turns out there's a lot of practical stuff Liz shares- for one to get married and stay in the states the FBI is required to investigate me, which could take months. This is to crack down on mail-order bride/enslavement or forced prostitution type marriages. So plan ahead to have your life combed through, and make no plans until the FBI gives you the green light.

My name means maiden (unmarried) and for most of my life I've had a nagging feeling that I might just end up one. It's not that I've lived a loveless life, but I've rarely met people that impressed me enough to carry on a serious relationship with. So when Sylvain came along, I find myself humbled by the love that grew. Like Liz and Felipe we will have to get married if we insist on pursuing a shared future together. It is my experience that this kind of commitment- marriage- is largely consumed by the act of a wedding and the accoutrements that surround a wedding, rings, dresses, bridesmaids, menu choices etc.

Sylvain and I both see the big white event as antiquated, garish and ostentatious. I have several friends who have had lovely and terribly fun wedding parties, but it feels too important to symbolize with diamonds, bloated guest lists and overpriced venues. After all, as Liz recounts in Commitment marriages based on love have an overwhelming rate of failure. With matters of the heart, vows or not, sometimes hearts change. So isn't there something shameful about throwing a huge party, gloating over a huge rock and then having it all fail? Wouldn't it be better to plan a wedding that acknowledges a wedding is merely one day in a lifetime, hopefully a happy day, but nonetheless a rather easy one considering what surely lies ahead when two people commit to cohabitating for life.

Im not suggesting some sort of amish restraint, but instead that perhaps the cost of wedding ought not to exceed a down payment on a house, and that really we acknowledge that the size of ones diamond engagement ring is not always in proportion to the strength of love or length of marriage.

Still, I think Liz may have something here- while we may all not be as lucky as Liz in Felipe in having found nauseating perfect love- I do believe she proposes an important chapter propped against the tragedy of The Bachelor style romances that I am sometimes afraid have begun to mis-define love in America. She insists that at 25 she was too young and dumb to have thought about any of this her first up to bat and left it's success all up to chance- and so it failed- so she asks her readers to take the time to consider with her, just what some of the right reasons might be and at some points out why bother? It's just due diligence people.

It turns out I like reading Liz's book, it's probably because we share a lot of the same ideas about the framework of a marriage, and of course having your opinions validated by another is rarely an unhappy thing.