Looking at Marriage

In the middle of a reading bender. I just got back from Brazil, and with the jet lag, I've had many late nights poring over old books and reading new ones. The latest was Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert's "sequel" to Eat, Pray, Love. It's a little haphazard -- skipping from point to point without a very strong narrative -- but it's basically an exploration of the institution of marriage: its origins, its evolution, its pitfalls.

I thought one of more interesting points was her synopsis of a Rutgers University report entitled "Alone Together: How Marriage is Changing in America." Part of the report examines "divorce proneness": how likely a couple is to fail based on certain demographic factors. Unsurprisingly, Gilbert notes that, as per the report: "[t]he age of a couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later."

In addition, she points out seven additional factors based on her understanding of the report (*this is directly quoted from her):

1. Education. The better-educated you are, statistically speaking, the better off your marriage will be. The better-educated a woman is, in particular, the happier her marriage will be.

2. Children. The statistics show that couples with young children at home report "more disenchantment" within their marriage than couples with grown children, or couples who have no children at all.

3. Cohabitation: It appears that people who live together before marriage have a slightly higher divorce rate than those who wait until marriage to cohabit.

4. Heterogamy: The less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce. Opposites do attract, but they don't always endure. Sociologists suspect that this trend will diminsh as society's prejudices break down over time, but for now?

5. Social Integration: The more tightly wove a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be.

6. Religiousness: The more religious a couple is, the more likely they are to stay married, although faith offers only a slight edge.

7. Gender Fairness: Marriages based on a traditional, restrictive sense about a woman's place in the home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female and thankless household chores.

A few thoughts on this:

• I don't think a lot of it is surprising. For instance, getting married later in life means that you're more in tune with yourself, your needs, your desires. On the other hand, as some of my family members have pointed out: the younger you are, the more adaptable you are, able to grow together.
• Once again, people: correlation does not signify causation. I don't think these factors are set in stone, and who knows the predictive success? (I tried finding the study online and failed, so I also can't examine it more thoroughly. For example, what was the non-response rate?) Also, I'm a little skeptical of the author's ability to parse through the report, but that just comes from my belief that statistics can often be easily manipulated. (Numbers might not lie, but how one interprets the numbers can often be a game.)
• What about the other intangibles, like life goals? If two partners are thoroughly incompatible in terms of what they're seeking in life, what is the predictive success of the marriage?
• I'm a little unclear what this measured: Happiness? Tendency to divorce? What of the couples unhappily married?

So who knows, but there you have it. An interpretation of marital success based on Elizabeth Gilbert's understanding of a Rutgers report.

On Love

I've admittedly been a little down on romance lately: not because of any one thing in particular, but the culmination of watching relationships around me disintegrate (and, perhaps, watching Eat, Pray, Love last night with unnamed, and occasionally weepy, friends.)

That said, while I'm not generally prone to thoughts of spiritual messages from the universe, it seemed particularly fortuitous that I stumbled across the following passage from The Prophet while at the British Museum gift shop yesterday:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you,
So shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth,
So is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Eat, Pray, Love

I didn't expect to like "Eat, Pray, Love." I picked it up a few days before a month-long trip, and in my sleep-deprived, angst-ridden, post-Bar-exam state, I was too tired to research something I actually wanted to read. Instead, standing in the airport bookshop, I had a vague recollection that Hillary Clinton had mentioned reading it, and so I threw it in my bag for my travels through Spain.

You know where this is going. I devoured it. Multiple times, actually. Every morning, I would bore everyone with the passages I had read the night before, insisting on reading them out loud. There were so many passages that spoke to me, but one in particular resonates at this moment:

"The Bhagavad Gita - that ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly." Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Could there be a higher goal than that?