Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

Committed: A Love Story is the sequel to Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which chronicled her solo journey around the world after a devastating divorce. In Committed, Gilbert picks up her story with Felipe, the kind, affectionate Brazilian-born gemstone importer she fell in love with near the end of those earlier travels. Both were survivors of painful divorces, and both had sworn never to marry again. They pledged lifelong fidelity privately but deliberately avoided legal marriage, finding emotional security in this arrangement. For their first years together, they commuted between countries, eventually settling near Philadelphia, where Felipe entered and exited the United States on consecutive ninety-day tourist visas.

Their carefully constructed life collapsed at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport when a Homeland Security officer detained Felipe for six hours of interrogation. Although Felipe had not broken any laws, the officer explained that his pattern of consecutive visits amounted to living in the country on tourist visas, and he would no longer be permitted to enter. The officer, whom they came to call Officer Tom, advised that the fastest path back was for the couple to marry so Felipe could obtain a fiancé visa. Felipe was handcuffed, jailed overnight, and sent to Australia. Gilbert flew home to Philadelphia, dismantled their household, hired an immigration lawyer, and began the visa process.

Recognizing that she had entered her first marriage at 25 with no understanding of the institution, Gilbert resolves to use the months of enforced waiting to study marriage and make peace with it. Her sister Catherine, a historian, shipped her boxes of scholarly books by writers like Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Cott. Gilbert and Felipe traveled frugally through Southeast Asia on the remnants of her last book contract, their case further delayed by a new congressional law requiring the FBI to investigate all Americans seeking to marry foreigners.

In a village of the Hmong, an ethnic minority community in northern Vietnam, Gilbert questions local women about marriage with the help of a twelve-year-old translator named Mai. The women laughed at Gilbert's questions about falling in love and the secret to a happy marriage, revealing that they do not place marriage at the center of their emotional identities. In Hmong society, men and women draw sustenance from same-gender communities rather than expecting a spouse to serve as best friend, confidant, and intellectual equal. Gilbert contrasts this with her own culture, where a spouse is expected to provide intimacy, autonomy, security, and inspiration simultaneously, and she begins to wonder whether modern Western marriage carries a burden the institution was never built to bear.

Gilbert's research takes her through centuries of Western marriage history. She traces how early marriage functioned as a clan-building survival tool, how early Christianity was hostile to marriage, and how for roughly a thousand years the church did not consider it sacred. She examines the legal doctrine of coverture, which held that a married woman's civil existence was absorbed into her husband's, and notes that this legacy persisted in American law into the 1970s and 1980s. She addresses racial discrimination in marriage law, including the prohibition against slave marriages and the criminalization of interracial marriage until the landmark 1967 case of Richard and Mildred Loving. She argues in favor of same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage has always evolved to accommodate new standards of fairness.

She traces the rise of love-based marriage from the 18th century onward, observing that wherever arranged marriage gives way to choice-based marriage, divorce rates rise. She reflects on her own "expressive divorce," in which she left her first marriage because of unhappiness rather than abuse, and concludes that divorce may be the collective price a culture pays for linking love to marriage. Drawing on anthropologist Helen Fisher's research comparing the brain chemistry of infatuated lovers to that of people with addictions, Gilbert distinguishes her relationship with Felipe from infatuation: She remained intact within her own personality during their courtship and recognized that he could not complete her. She also finds hope in psychologist Shirley P. Glass's "walls and windows" theory, which holds that affairs begin when a married person shares intimacies with an outsider that belong within the marriage's protective boundaries, suggesting that fidelity can be actively managed.

During their exile, Gilbert and Felipe negotiated the practical terms of their union. They agreed that fidelity was nonnegotiable and that they would not have children. They navigated serious differences about money: Gilbert is a compulsive saver, while Felipe, shaped by Brazil's volatile economy, distrusts banks and prefers to hold wealth in gemstones and real estate. In a pivotal exchange on the banks of the Mekong River, Gilbert presented Felipe with a list of her five worst character flaws. Felipe responded with his own and offered an analogy from the gemstone trade: When buying a "parcel" of stones, the real skill is honestly assessing whether you can work with the flawed ones. He told Gilbert he could accept the whole parcel.

Gilbert investigates how marriage affects women differently than men, presenting research on the "Marriage Benefit Imbalance": Married men live longer and report greater happiness than single men, while married women do not fare better than their single counterparts. She explores this through her own family. Her grandmother Maude achieved rare independence as a young woman in the 1930s but sacrificed her savings and autonomy after marrying farmer Carl Olson. Yet Maude named the early years of her marriage as her happiest, because she had never dared to dream she would have a family. Gilbert's understanding deepens during a dinner in Laos with Keo and his pregnant wife Noi. When Keo boasted about Noi's clever idea for a year-round frog-breeding greenhouse, Noi swelled with pride, and Gilbert sees her grandmother's face reflected in Noi's: Both women knew the joy of being indispensable to someone and building something together.

Gilbert examines her own decision not to have children and celebrates the historical role of childless women as an "Auntie Brigade," women whose undepleted energies serve as a resource for their wider communities. Her mother's story offers another lens on marriage's costs: Gilbert's mother found meaningful work coordinating a Planned Parenthood clinic in Connecticut but quit in 1976 when Gilbert's father refused to take time off so she could attend a professional conference. In a phone call from Laos, her mother revealed that her happiest years had been since her children left home, but added that dwelling on what she gave up in the early years of her marriage filled her with rage. Gilbert accepts that these contradictory feelings cannot be neatly resolved.

Tensions between Gilbert and Felipe escalated as months of travel wore on. During a grueling bus ride through Laos, Felipe erupted about the humiliation of his arrest and his powerlessness, then defused the argument by invoking their shared code phrase, "Let's be careful right now." Gilbert realized that Felipe needed stability rather than adventure and shifted their plan. After resting in Bangkok, where Gilbert took a brief solo trip to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, they flew to Bali and settled into Felipe's old house. In those familiar surroundings, Felipe regained his calm. Gilbert's breakthrough toward accepting marriage comes when she discovers Ferdinand Mount's The Subversive Family, which argues that nonarranged marriage is inherently subversive because the private intimacy between two people resists all authoritarian control. This reframing allows her to see herself as joining a long tradition of couples who stubbornly chose each other.

Events accelerated when the FBI investigation concluded and Felipe was called to an interview at the U.S. Consulate in Sydney. Gilbert returned to the United States before Christmas, signing papers on a converted 1802 Presbyterian chapel in a New Jersey mill town and preparing a home without knowing whether Felipe would be allowed back. A last-minute scramble over a missing Brazilian police clearance document was resolved when their friend Armenia, who had originally introduced them in Bali, stood in line all day at a Rio de Janeiro police station and overnighted the papers just in time. Felipe passed his interview on January 18, 2007, and flew to JFK, where Gilbert met him after 10 months of separation.

They married on a cold Sunday afternoon in February 2007 in their still-unpacked church-house. Gilbert wore her favorite red sweater; Felipe wore his clean blue shirt, having just removed his cooking apron. Her aunt Deborah, a trained opera singer, sang "La Vie en Rose," a song Felipe always sings while cooking. Gilbert's niece Mimi, who had long insisted on a proper wedding, served as flower girl with yellow rose petals. A local mayor administered standard New Jersey civil vows, which Gilbert and Felipe repeated without irony or hesitation, acknowledging that their marriage belonged in part to their families, in part to the state, and in part to history. The family dog curled up on the floor between them, a detail Gilbert connects to medieval wedding portraits in which a dog between the couple symbolizes fidelity. After a long lunch with wine and toasts, sleet began to fall and the guests departed. Gilbert and Felipe were left alone to clean up the dishes and begin unpacking their home.