Love, Marriage & Expectations

Question: Is it possible to balance friendship and romance?

Elizabeth Gilbert: It’s so easy to find the balance between yourself and your partner. No, I’m kidding. It’s not. It’s not at all. You know, “Eat, Pray, Love” ends on a very romantic note because it ends within the first two months of a very romantic relationship, right? And so, for me, now, I’m 5 years into that relationship so it’s always sort of funny to me when people come up and they’re… and they still have… just finish the book and they still have this very starry-eyed idea like, oh lovely, you found this very romantic relationship, you know. And that very romantic relationship has now evolved into a marriage, you know, which, like, everybody else’s marriage, is complex. And, you know, it’s much richer than the romantic relationship in the first two months was. But I… I should’ve share to people that, you know, was actually evolved into an actual real partnership now. And, you know, I think that some people were really delighted by the ending of that because it gave them hope for romance, which we all hold dear in our hearts. I think some people were agitated by the end of that book because they felt like it sent a message that… you know. And therefore, the ending is that you have to find a guy and you have to, you know, you have to be loved in this certain way. And, you know, the story was told in a way that it was told simply because that’s what happened, you know. What happened was that I did happen to meet somebody who is really lovely and I wanted to pursue that. I think… You know, I… You know, somebody said, “Well, do you think the message is that you need… you know, that you need love?” And I was like, “Well, I think the message is that you need healthy love, you know. And if you can find that or something that’s as close to that as you possible can, that’s, you know, by all means, that’s something that you should feel entitled to look for.Question: What are your thoughts on marriage?Gilbert: A lot of these questions… I’ve been thinking about it a lot and working on it a lot ‘cause my next book is all about marriage, which is, of course, you know, marriage is kind of the antithesis to romance in a way. And I ended up having to get married because the Homeland Security department got involved and actually chucked my sweetheart out of the country. And the only way I could get him back was to marry him. And I have, you know, for reasons I probably don’t have to go into, really ambivalent feelings about the whole institution of marriage. And so, again, because I have a lot of time on my hands because I’m a writer, I could spend, you know, 2 years doing nothing but reading books about the history of marriage and sort of trying to wrap my mind around ideas about marriage. And… I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert on it but I would say that it becomes clearer to me, the more I read about it, why it is so very, very confusing for people to try to figure out the balance in their lives and between self and other… And again, this isn’t a particularly easy time to be trying to figure that out because those roles have opened up. And men and women can be all sorts of different things in each other’s lives than they could be in more traditional and rigorous societies. The stakes are huge because our expectations for happiness are huge. But the opportunities are also really vast because we have a lot of options and organizing our lives by our own terms. So again, welcome to modern life. I also just think… I don’t know. There comes a certain point in your life… I mean, one thing that’s been really interesting to me about doing all this research about marriage is just realizing how the expectations that we have burdened in this institution with, at this point in history, are staggeringly huge. You know, on every generation since the 1700s in Western culture has just heaped another layer of expectation on what they want out of this relationship called marriage. And it is so out of scale right now. And, you know, there were some survey that… Back in the 1920s, there was a survey that asked college women what they wanted in a partner and they listed all these virtues, you know, reliability, honesty, decency, morality, you know. And somewhere down around 6 or 7 on the list came love and passion. These things showed up sort of low on the list. Prudence was sort up high, you know. And then, in the 1970s, they ask those questions again to women and, you know, the very first thing on the list is, like, love, you know, love and connection and intimacy and then, you know, the other stuff they weren’t really paying very much attention to. And now, it’s even worse ‘cause they ask this question and they say they want a man who will inspire them everyday. Like, I think that’s a lot, you know. Like… You know, or to be asked, you know, to want to… to expect that the person in your life, should sort of almost in this divine way, every single day, inspire you. It’s a huge thing to want somebody to be. And, you know, it’s a huge thing to have somebody want from you, you know. I’m only capable of inspiring people, like, every 3rd Wednesday, you know. Like, the rest of the time, I’m just trying to, like, find my, you know, keys. You know… I mean, it’s… It’s hard. And so, you know… Well, I would never sit down with a young woman and say to her, lower your expectations as a piece of advice for life. I think it’s been really sanity inducing in me, just after doing all this research about marriage to realize. For better or worse, my expectations are really big, you know, and do with that what you wish, you know. But that’s a good piece of information to know. Because we shouldn’t walk around, thinking that this is how people have always thought about marriage or that this is what people have always expected out of their marriages. And… You know, I’m not quite sure how you resolve that but it’s just a piece of information I didn’t have before, that I have it now. And it somehow changes things. When inevitable disappointments or frustrations arise, I just think, what would a 17th century wife think about this, you know… you know, what did my great grandmother think about this. There’s… It’s just… It’s helpful.

Question: How have your thoughts on sexuality changed?
Gilbert: Well… I mean, I think like a lot of women when I was younger. I don’t think I was so much concerned with being objectified. I think I was kind of wishing I would be a little bit more objectified. You know, I’d always been the smart girl and the bookish girl. And I… You know, there was a certain sort of sexual attention that I was longing for. And I was… I was wishing that I could generate… And then, I was always really happy to get and always really happy to pursue whether or not it benefited me to be out, chasing that in a certain way. Well, I was going to say it’s up for debate but it’s not. It actually… Actually, it was not beneficial to be giving so much attention to that. I was a boy crazy kid and I wanted a lot, you know. I’m a very excitable person and I’m a very passionate person. And, you know, just in the same way that as a writer, I wanted to kind of go and roll around in the world and experience it in really huge ways. I mean, I had a big hungry heart that wanted to know love and infatuation and to disappear into the other end, you know. I mean, everything that you could do to try to do that, I did, you know. And the results were fairly predictable. You know, it’s like a lot of messes, you know, a lot of just really messy experimentation with intimacy, a lot of, like, throwing… impaling myself on people on really unhealthy ways, a lot of carelessness toward people and other really unhealthy ways. It’s just a… It was just a big, flat, hot mess, you know. But, I guess, I had to go through that, you know, as many of us do and kind of, you know, see that all out to its natural conclusion and then, take a lot of time to be alone, you know. It’s interesting ‘cause therapists always say that they have 2 kinds of patients. The ones that need to be, like, screwed in a little tighter and the ones that need to be loosened up, you know. And I was definitely one who needs to be screwed a little tighter, you know. I know that, like, that other people’s psychological problems, that they’re too withholding and mine was, you know, kind of the opposite. I had to sort of narrow my margins in order to become sane. And a lot of that, for me, came just from spending a lot of time by myself, which I never done before ‘cause I was always seeking that reflection in the other person. And… You know, I have a really pretty good relationship now. And, you know, I sleep with one eye open when it comes to love because I’ve made such huge mistakes and I’ve been punished for those mistakes. So, I think, when you’ve been through a divorce as crappy as my divorce and when you’ve been through, you know, breakups as bad as my breakup, you’re always a little… you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop a little bit. Like, when is this… You know, is this really… is this real ‘cause this is pretty good but, you know, how long is this going to last. But I also… I don’t know. I try not to walk around, calling trouble’s name. You know, if things are going well, I try to be happy to just let that be well and recognize that if trouble wants to find you, it knows where you live and it will come and knock on your door. But I don’t go looking for it very much anymore.

Source: BigThink