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I went to hear Elizabeth Gilbert last night. I must confess, I didn’t like “Eat, Pray, Love,” although there were moments in her massive best-seller that I did like. I thought I might be the only woman who felt that way, but I have met a few others. It seemed to show the worst of women — needy, neurotic, obsessive, self-absorbed — made even more so by the fact that it was published after “The Last American Man,” whose subject, a self-styled man, is often viewed in mythic ways as the best of manhood.
And in person, she is warm, self-depricating, genuine; then I felt bad that I wrote the book off, perhaps too quickly.
But Gilbert is back with another book about — perhaps not surprisingly — marriage. As in her own: "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage." She marries “that guy,” the Brazilian-born Australian, José Nunes, whom she met in the “Love” part of the book (when he was called Felipe), even though they both feel strongly against marriage and agreed that they didn’t need to be married to love and commit to each other.
Why she marries him is to keep him in the country; his too frequent travels to the US caught the eye of Homeland Security and that was that.
I suppose that’s a good enough reason to marry — I know people who’ve married for less-compelling reasons, including me. But given the divorce rate for second marriages — at 60 percent, it’s higher than the rate for first marriages — you have to wonder why people get married again.
No one asked her that question in the Q&A portion of the evening. And I’m guessing that she and Jose really wouldn’t have gotten married if they didn’t have to. Who knows? Yet I married a second time as do many of us. Why? I thought I knew more about myself, the world and the man who was going to be my second husband. I thought I had learned from my “mistakes” of my first marriage. I thought I was marrying smarter.
As is often the case, the lessons learned from the past don’t always work neatly in the problems of today. I was no smarter the second time, and because I then had two children with my second husband, the consequences were much more severe. Divorce is terrible; divorce with children is beyond terrible, even in the “best” divorces.
Would I get married again? No ... well, unless the man I loved was going to be deported from the country. Or if it really, really mattered to him to do so. And would I be smarter this time? I want to say yes — I spent a lot of time delving into what went wrong in my marriages, and how I contributed to that. But who knows?
Have you or would you get married a second or third time? Why?
And would you/did you marry smarter?
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