The End of Single Women

Blockbuster memoir Eat, Pray, Love was the ultimate story of a woman finding freedom, so why did Elizabeth Gilbert get married? Lizzie Skurnick on the new marriage problem.

Given our culture’s fascination with getting to the happily ever after, why is it always so unsatisfying to hear from someone already there? Is it that details prized from the circumspect spouses are almost belligerent in their banality? (See Michelle Obama on Barack’s morning breath.) That the narratives themselves are so ludicrously one-gendered? (When’s the last time you saw a husband wrestle in print about a marital bed he still enjoys?) Or that a genuinely frank admission peskily seems always to herald a union’s complete demise? (Commence countdown on the wife half of the recent Times piece who admitted in the first paragraph to hating French kissing.)

Perhaps it’s the problem of writing about marriage at all—since there’s no greater act of hostility to a character than to saddle her with anything so tedious as a devoted spouse. Before Bridget Jones, works from Madame Bovary to Main Street to Heartburn to Terms of Endearment did their readers the favor of treating marriage as a many-gated prison, ringing with the plaints of aggrieved detainees, rather than a pleasant destination which, once reached, requires no further act of carnage than ripping the seal off the seat.

No matter how many gelatos we eat or ashrams we enjoy, we are always steering our liberated little ship away from one altar and toward another.

Allegedly, Committed, by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, is one such work. But in fact it is the final death knell to the single girl—our Mary Tyler Moore, our Annie Hall, our Kelly Taylor (“I choose me!”). A decade of chick lit, self-help, confession, and how-to have crushed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and One Day at a Time to smithereens, and we are condemned to drift in Gilbert’s oeuvre, where, no matter how many gelatos we eat or ashrams we enjoy, we are always steering our liberated little ship away from one altar and toward another.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. By Elizabeth Gilbert. 304 pages. Viking. $26.95. When Eat, Pray, Love leaves off, Gilbert has just unearthed her soulful soulmate, Felipe. Followers of such extended-edition romances as Sex and the City know it is customary for a sequel at such time to contrive to nix the gentlemen in question from the plot, lest a narrative propelled by uncertainty and turmoil suddenly grind to a halt, alienating fans. Excising your soulmate from a memoir about your relationship is difficult to pull off, but Gilbert is delivered a plot twist courtesy of the U.S. government, which revokes Filipe’s visa in the name of Homeland Security.

Now, in his absence, a new, unencumbered journey can begin! Because, though dueling statuses had already reduced their time together to 90-day stints in a rented house in Philly, and though the couple cannot tolerate an itinerant life abroad, Gilbert is nonetheless unable to wrap her head around Xeroxing a dossier to put her country’s stamp of approval on the man to whom she’s already pledged, in a private ceremony, her eternal soul.

Why Gilbert is so desperately undone by the notion of the green-card marriage is ostensibly the author’s question to herself, but it increasingly becomes one for the reader. Even a Homeland Security officer, as he takes Felipe away, feels compelled to explain the obvious. “No, seriously—what’s the problem?” asked Officer Tom. “You two have obviously been cohabiting already. You obviously care about each other, you’re not married to anyone else… you could always sign a prenuptial agreement… I mean, if you’re worried about going through all the financial mess of a divorce again. Or if it’s the relationship issues that scare you, maybe some counseling would be a good idea.”

It would—although a work in which one “unravel[s] the history of monogamous Western marriage in order to better understand my inherited assumptions, the shape of my family’s narrative, and my culturally specific catalog of anxieties” seems more in order for readers accustomed to seeing Gilbert get her insights on the go. Having made a living privileging her own qualms and elations to their flesh-and-blood sources, it is an easy trick for Gilbert to sidestep the question of her own suitability to her fiancé, on which she spends two pages, in order to bring us among the Hmong, where she discusses arranged marriages, or to her matrilineal forebears, where she finds meaning in a grandmother’s cut-up coat.