Committed

I started reading Elizabeth Gilbert's follow up novel to "Eat Pray Love". The title of her book is "Committed". Her second memoir takes off after Liz and Felipe encounter a major obstacle in their love story. So in this book, Liz being a skeptic when it comes to matrimony learns to tackle and make peace with this sacred institution.

I'm still not done with the book. I tend to fall asleep after reading a few pages. Not because it is a boring novel. But mostly because I'm tired and already sleepy by the time I get to open its pages.

It is a well researched book. She includes many details about matrimony from its history to modern times. As well as several insights from her friends, her relatives on their thoughts about marriage. It is also peppered with good quotes from well known personalities and experts.

I now realize this post seems like a book review. But it ain't. I haven't finish it yet. I originally wanted to quote some sentences from the book which reminded me of my own parents' marriage. Here are the excerpts:

Then there is the companionship. My parents have been married for over 40 years now. By and large, they've worked out their deal. They live in a pretty smooth routine, their habits polished by time's current. They orbit each other in the same basic pattern every day.

The poet Jack Gilbert (no relation, sadly for me) wrote that marriage is what happens "between the memorable". He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are "the vacations, and emergencies" - the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage.

Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody - so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

My father once joked - not really joking - that my mother manages about 95 percent of his life. The wonder of it, he mused, is that she's much more upset about the 5 percent of his life that he won't relinquish than he is about the 95 percent that she utterly dominates.

Happy 43rd anniversary to my Mom and Dad. We love you both dearly. =)