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Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage QUOTES

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage QUOTES

1 " To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

2 " People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of it.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

3 " Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

4 " My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homonculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

5 " Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

6 " I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

7 " Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

8 " I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

9 " You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

10 " With each reunion (we) had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me? "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

11 " the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

12 " every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimatesecrets of your marriage. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

13 " Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air? "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

14 " In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

15 " Still it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated socially responsible family-centered taxpaying Little League-coaching nation-serving respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic ne'er-do-well heterosexual deadbeats like me "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

16 " We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

17 " Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

18 " The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution). "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

19 " Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

20 " It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage