I’ve just launched into Elizabeth Gilbert’s book about marriage, Committed. I didn’t get very far with Eat, Pray, Love, because her experience didn’t speak to me, so the shabby use of tense annoyed me.
This book is more interesting to me so far, for obvious reasons. I will most likely have a lot to say about marriage in the next couple of days.
For tonight, after an argument with special k (which between us tends to be a tense, rational conversation full of ominous silences), there’s this: Marriage isn’t conducted to some cosmic scale of weights and balances. “Unfair” is simply irrelevant. You try and figure out what’s important and you do whatever it takes.
Just because a person is married doesn’t mean they don’t love, or even fall in love with other people. No-one who knows anything about marriage (should) ever (have) said that. I like the question posed by this cartoon, the next frames invite a “choose your own ending” activity. Erich Fromm (who wrote The Art of Loving) ‘considered love to be an interpersonal creative capacity’ rather than an emotion; it’s affirming to fall in love with other people, it shows we have a great capacity that needs a great creativity to allow something truly loving to arise in our social world As It Is In Heaven (the movie as well as the prayer).