Committed

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Author: Elizabeth Gilbert (also of Eat, Pray, Love)


I love Liz Gilbert's style of writing. She's witty, entertaining, exciting, and relatable. I thoroughly enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love and though this book has a different style, I still found it irresistible. I appreciate both the academic and personal approach she took on discovering the history of marriage. She mixes in humor and personal fears and experiences to balance the heaviness of the subject material. She also fills the book with excitement as she uses examples of marriage, love and life in several different cultures that I wouldn't necessarily want to read about in boring/heady history books. I can visit and learn about these cultures vicariously through her more travel-beaten shoes. Committed is an escape to other worlds through Liz's eyes while still being tethered to my own world as I was forced to inspect my own marriage and ideals.
I most certainly recommend this book as well as Eat, Pray, Love if you haven't already read that one. Next I'm going to start on her fiction so I'll let you know how that goes!
Some favorite quotes from Committed:

• The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.
• In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers--always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.
• Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person.
• Marriage has bonsai energy: It's a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such construction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-climbing vine.
• This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

*On a personally exciting note, I found while reading the acknowledgments that Elizabeth's sister is none other than author Catherine Gilbert Murdock whose Dairy Queen series novels I thoroughly enjoyed! Proves you should always read the acknowledgments!