Walls and windows

A couple weeks ago I read a book called Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat Pray Love fame.  It offered me some of the best marital advice I’ve ever gotten (which reminds me of a funny story about my mom).

I wish I had copied this straight out of the book but alas, it’s back at the library (or hopefully being read by someone else impressionable).  The book is called a sequel by some people, but I hope people aren’t disappointed when they read it and find it is hardly Eat Pray Love 2 (Eat Pray Love Returns? Son of Eat Pray Love?).

It’s more a history of marriage and it’s adaptations and evolutions over the years.  Each chapter is “Marriage and” something, for example “Marriage and Motherhood,” “Marriage and Religion.”  Again, I wish I’d taken notes.  It’s really interesting and covers a lot of ground, geographically and chronologically.

The basic plot that makes it a sequel is that Eliz and the man she falls in love with near the end of Eat Pray Love are blissfully happy together, and swear never to marry, having both been married before and liking things the way they are now.  But when he’s banned from entering the US, they have to face up to the fact that the quickest and easiest way to secure him a permanent visa is to be married.  So while they gather paperwork and get it processed (just under a year, I think) she travels with him and investigates the sacrament of marriage as it applies to many cultures and generations, in order to work out her own perspective and point of view on marriage.

But the part that really stood out for me, the best marital advice I’ve ever gotten goes something like this.  In every relationship, like a room, you have walls and windows.  The walls go up around you and you don’t let other people see certain things about the two of you and your relationship.  The windows are the parts you make public.  Sometimes, you will connect with someone outside your relationship and have an intimate and amazing conversation with them, in which you put up extra windows between you and this outside person.  Then you feel guilty so you don’t tell your partner, thereby putting up a wall between the two of you.  Then this continues until everything is so mixed up, there are windows and walls everywhere, and you end up making out with this new person, and then you cry to all your friends saying you weren’t “looking to cheat” and it “just happened.”

What Eliz says you should do, if you find yourself in that type of intimate conversation with an outside person, before anything goes any further, is you should go to your partner and say, “I had this incredible conversation with Mark today, like the kind you and I used to have, and I don’t know why I let that happen.  I would rather share these things with you, so let’s talk.”  Basically.

I think you can apply “walls and windows” to all sorts of situations, not just the example above.  If it’s true that your loyalty, first and foremost, should be to your partner, it eliminates a lot of guesswork.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have confidences outside your relationship (bestie girlfriends, anyone?) or that you should confess every single thing (sometimes I find myself doing this, and rather than titillate Drew I think it just bores him, LOL).  But I think that if two people can keep this concept as the foundation of their relationship, lots of trouble would be avoided over the years.  Walls and windows, people.