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Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage quotes about marriage
The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people… would accept marriage on it’s thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don’t believe in evolution).
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
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.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die a violent death than single women—usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman’s life is her own man.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect—only if they happen to be talking about Judaism.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
The Buddha referred to married people as “householders.” He even gave clear instructions as to how one should be a good householder: Be nice to your spouse, be honest, be faithful, give alms to the poor, buy some insurance against fire and flood . . . I’m dead serious: The Buddha literally advised married couples to buy property insurance.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Still it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated socially responsible family-centered taxpaying Little League-coaching nation-serving respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic ne’er-do-well heterosexual deadbeats like me
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable 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?
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
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 intimatesecrets of your marriage.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
In every possible instance Saint Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves to contain their carnal yearnings to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven. “But if they cannot contain ” Paul finally conceded then “let them marry for it is better to marry than to burn.” Which is perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
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