Marriage Can Be Hard..But...

I’m always thinking about relationships and marriage. It’s one of my favorite reading topics, because, of course, I love learning about what makes people tick, and intimate relationships are the perfect crucible. I find that sometimes the best learning comes from reading about relationships that don’t work, …until they do.

I know it’s a book that divides the field, but I loved Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, “Eat. Pray.

Love”

 I’ve read it and listened to it. I especially love what she has to say about God and pleasure and faith and how she learned to overcome her fear.

Yes, it did help that she had a big house to sell and a huge book advance. But, for me, none of that discounts her humor and the good grace of her book. 

I especially loved when she asked –by name-- everyone in the universe co-sign her prayer to have her divorce end peaceably. And I also loved the water tower scene in India, when finally turning that ex over to God—and seeing their higher selves meeting and releasing. 

But the book that followed “Eat, Pray, Love” was Gilbert’s second memoir, and the continuation of the story.  “Committed” is about marriage and how Gilbert reluctantly married the man she fell in love with at the end of “Eat, Pray, Love.”

One of my favorite lines from Committed is this: “There is good reason to end such stories with weddings, and buoyant celebrations of love. Because what follows a wedding is a marriage. And marriage is an institution, not a party.”

That’s a great line, and quite borrowable for toasts, I think.

What Gilbert also says is this: “Marriage is hard when you invest all of your expectations for happiness in one other person. A man can be part of a good life, but not the life.”

Now that’s a great poster or a mantra for young women.

So how do you get to a great marriage from the reality of “Marriage is hard”? The recipe is this: Invest in all parts of your life and in many relationships. You have to make (intentionally create) your own good and full life, and then a partner can become a great accessory.

Indeed.

*****

I write a lot about relationships and marriage in my book, “Out of the Woods”—available at bookstores and, of course, on Amazon.

We Measure Our Age in Tubes

It was T. S. Eliot who famously said “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” What a lovely image for and from a great poet. But this week I glimpsed another way I can measure my aging life: I can count the tubes.

Yes, you might remember going to Grandma’s house, or maybe to your Mother’s and her medicine cabinet had a million squashed tubes of this and that. Some were shiny, some rusty, and some gooey with missing caps, and you thought, “How does that happen?”

Maybe you also remember when your medicine cabinet had aspirin, birth control, Vaseline and maybe an antibiotic? 

And then as you got a few years older, there are a few more things and then, suddenly it seems, you (like me last week) look at that basket under the bathroom sink and its full of tubes!

We now have all manner of tubes with creams, ointments and lotions. They are specialized and generalized. We have tubes with goop for every body part and every disturbance. They are oily, creamy, pink, clear or shiny. They range from first aid uses to germ killing to fungus battling to skin soothing.  Some I bought off the shelf and a few were prescribed. 

But this is the new measurement of my life—no longer romantic coffee spoons or lovers past. Now I measure my life—and ours—in tubes.